Preamble

The House met at half-past Two o'clock

PRAYERS

[MR. SPEAKER in the Chair]

Oral Answers to Questions — TRANSPORT

London (Road and Rail Developments)

Mr. Corbyn: To ask the Secretary of State for Transport what are the comparative costs of road development in London and the proposed public financing of rail developments.

The Minister for Public Transport (Mr. Michael Portillo): As the House may know, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport is attending a meeting abroad today and has asked me to give his apologies to the House.
Expenditure on road developments by my Department, the London local authorities and the London Docklands development corporation is expected to amount to some £300 million in 1988–89. That compares with planned investment of more than £450 million on rail development by British Rail Network SouthEast, London Regional Transport and the London Docklands development corporation.

Mr. Corbyn: Is the Minister not concerned that the road assessment studies for London propose the expenditure of £3·5 billion and the destruction of 6,000 homes, and that all of that would be borne by the public

purse and taxpayers, who would pay for the whole road development? Yet a much smaller cost of £2 billion for the central London rail study would largely be borne by the fare-paying public, either through interest charges to private investment being put into the rail system or by increased fares for those who wish to use the central London rail system when it is developed. Does the Minister not think that it is time that the majority of people who travel by public transport benefited from public expenditure and the minority of commuter motorists who drive in and out of London were forced to pay for the destruction that they are causing our city and the exorbitant cost of the road development that is planned to appease them?

Mr. Portillo: The position is not as the hon. Gentleman has represented it. The assessment studies are consultants' studies, not departmental ideas and the consultants are still looking at ways of minimising the effect. All the options will have to be considered in a framework that takes full account of the environmental impact. On the central London rail study, no decision has been taken on how the funding will be achieved.

Mr. Maples: Does my hon. Friend agree that major road developments in central London cause enormous environmental damage and often do little for traffic congestion? They simply encourage more people to use cars. Will he confirm that such environmental arid other externalised costs are taken into account in deciding levels of public subsidy for other forms of public transport?

Mr. Portillo: My hon. Friend is right. In answer to the previous question, I stressed that the environmental impact was most important and that we would not support any schemes that did more harm than good. My hon. Friend is also right to say that when proposals are made for investment the Department can look at any external benefits that there may be to non-users.

Mr. Chris Smith: The Minister will be aware of the enormous concern among my constituents and others in north London about the likely impact of the east London assessment study proposals. He will be further aware of


the growing concern at the extension of the private consultants' studies to the King's Cross area. Have any costings been done of any of the proposals that were drafted last year and which may come forward later this year from the study? Would it not be better if the Department of Transport scrapped the whole idea now?

Mr. Portillo: It would be better if people did not misrepresent what is going on. The important point is that we are looking at ideas from consultants which have not yet been finalised. They will be brought forward in the course of the summer and at that time we shall be able to judge the value of those ideas, to reject those that are not very useful and to proceed on those that have a promising future.

Mr. Adley: Does my hon. Friend agree that in assessing road versus rail costs in London or elsewhere it is important to be both sensible and honest? Does he agree, for example, that all the police costs connected with motoring must be taken into account as part of the costs of motoring? Is he aware that, despite lengthy efforts, I have failed to obtain from the Metropolitan police or the Home Office any idea of the amount of police time involved in policing London's motorists? Will my hon. Friend do his best to ensure that that information is available and is taken into account?

Mr. Portillo: My hon. Friend makes an important point. It is one of our principles that we expect those who use the roads to pay their full track costs, which would cover not only the cost of building the road but of maintaining it and, importantly, policing it.

Ms. Ruddock: Will the Minister explain why his Department banned the use of a computer model developed by the transport and road research laboratory and designed to evaluate the merits of different traffic policies for London? Will he confirm that the Government's policy of building more roads in London and cutting public transport subsidies scored lowest in that evaluation, and that a policy of investing in public transport scored highest? Despite his obvious embarrassment, will he now lift the ban so that the TRRL can get on with its work?

Mr. Portillo: I welcome the hon. Lady to her new position, and I hope that she will be very happy in it.
What the hon. Lady says about a lack of subsidy to public transport is not right. She will be aware that the amount of public subsidy to London Regional Transport is proposed to be increased, much to the displeasure of some of my hon. Friends behind me. That was not a powerful point. She will know that big investment is going on in London—about £1 billion on the roads programme, and a further amount of money as yet unsettled because we are still studying the central London rails subsidy proposals.

Mr. Speaker: I make a plea for brief supplementaries today to enable us to get more quickly down the Order Paper.

Motorway Construction

Mr. Knox: To ask the Secretary of State for Transport how much has been spent on new motorway construction in each of the past four years, at constant prices.

The Minister for Roads and Traffic (Mr. Peter Bottomley): In 1987–88 prices, £385 million, £298 million, £204 million and £176 million last year. The reduction reflects the completion of the M25 and more spending on trunk roads, bypasses and increased maintenance.

Mr. Knox: Given the amount of congestion on motorways at present, which is often caused by the sheer volume of traffic, does my hon. Friend realise that the figures are completely inadequate and that much more needs to be spent on motorway construction if British industry is to be competitive and if the frustration experienced by many motorists is to be reduced?

Mr. Bottomley: Yes, Sir. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State announced an increase in spending of between 20 per cent. and 40 per cent. over the next three years. That is a welcome increase following the reductions under the Labour Government. It is true that we need roads which are longer, wider and stronger.

Mr. Janner: Although spending on motorways is insufficient, does the Minister agree that there must be a balance between spending on motorways and spending on other roads? Does he know of the death of my constituent, Kerry Allen, aged eight, on New Parks estate? The county council had approved a pelican crossing but said that it did not have the money to install it. How long are we to have insufficient money for road safety? Is not the present position intolerable, unreasonable and totally insupportable?

Mr. Bottomley: The whole House would wish to join every family in grieving over a road death. There are 14 road deaths per day in this country. The nation rises to mourn when there are group deaths, but when 5,000 people a year die on the roads in this country, as the hon. and learned Gentleman said, we must obviously go on reducing the toll as fast as we possibly can.
In overall terms, the number of people killed and injured is 6 per cent. down on the number at this time last year, even though there has been a 4 per cent. increase in traffic, and there was a similar reduction the previous year. In population terms, Britain has fewer road deaths than any other country where there is motoring and drink.

Mr. Fry: In view of my hon. Friend's last remarks, is it not clear that we need more motorways so as to reduce the road accident rate further? What plans does he have to provide alternative routes for such as the M1 and M3 which are now so terribly congested?

Mr. Bottomley: Dealing with congestion is one point, but the point that my hon. Friend picked up from the hon. and learned Member for Leicester, West (Mr. Janner) is that three quarters of deaths and injuries take place in built-up areas. Motorways are not the answer in built-up areas. Bypasses or relief roads may be an answer, but the normal answer is traffic management and traffic calming so that where there are many pedestrians—[Interruption.]

Mr. Speaker: Order.

Mr. Bottomley: If I may finish, Mr. Speaker. Where there are many pedestrians, pedestrians get more priority and motorists get slightly less.

Channel Tunnel

Mr. Macdonald: To ask the Secretary of State for Transport what proposals he has to improve communications between Scotland and the south-east, in preparation for the opening of the Channel tunnel.

Mr. Portillo: British Rail is required by section 40 of the Channel Tunnel Act 1987 to publish a plan by the end of this year setting out its proposals for the dispersal of passenger and freight trains within the United Kingdom. The impact of the Channel tunnel is one of the many factors taken into account in planning the forward trunk road programme.

Mr. Macdonald: Will the Minister confirm a report in the "Politics Today" column of the Financial Times on Friday that a study that was prepared for the Prime Minister shows clearly that unless there is a major improvement in the road and rail network between Scotland and the south-east, Scotland will not benefit in any degree from the opening of the Channel tunnel? If that is so, why is the Minister cutting investment to British Rail by £300 million in the latest public expenditure White Paper and why are there no plans in the White Paper to improve the road and rail networks between Scotland and the south-east to enable Scotland to benefit from the economic activity of the Channel tunnel?

Mr. Portillo: There has been no cut in the investment of British Rail. Indeed, it has been rising sharply and will be £3·5 billion in coming years. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman is becoming confused with subsidies, which is a quite different matter and has nothing to do with how much is being invested.
I know of no evidence in any report to suggest that the links to the north are inadequate. On the whole, the inadequacies seem to be in the south-east. That is why there is a £600 million programme of investment in the south-east to improve the links. The north of England and Scotland stand to gain especially from the Channel tunnel because rail freight comes into its own over longer distances.

Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman: I heard the Minister's reply with delight. Does he agree that since Liverpool has excellent port facilities it makes admirable sense to improve the links between there and the Channel tunnel as it would prove an ideal through-port for goods from America to the continent?

Mr. Portillo: My hon. Friend refers to a most interesting idea. When we last had questions on this subject I referred to a study being conducted into that very matter. We are happy to co-operate with that study in any way.

Mr. George Howarth: Will the Minister therefore confirm that when the study for the landbridge concept for the port of Liverpool is completed and suggests that it is a feasible option the Government will look favourably on that proposal?

Mr. Portillo: We shall always look favourably at any commercial proposition put to us by British Rail.

However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster (Dame E. Kellett-Bowman) implied a moment ago, the port and road facilities at Liverpool already look as though they have plenty of capacity for that plan.

Mr. Hind: When my lion. Friend discusses these matters with the chairman of British Rail, will he bear in mind that there is still an important link from the whole of the west of country to the tunnel without going through London? All that my hon. Friend needs to do is to put some investment into the flyover at Redhill. That will then provide long routes and freight links all the way to the tunnel from the north-west, the south-west, Wales and Scotland and will definitely benefit the country as a whole.

Mr. Portillo: The important thing is that there should be through freight links between the regions and the Channel tunnel. That is British Rail's ambition and that is why it is working on its plan now. The exact route is a matter for British Rail. I am happy to mention the point to the chairman when I next see him but I am bound to tell my hon. Friend that he has made his case effectively on a number of occasions already.

Mr. Kennedy: The Minister will appreciate that the rail links between the highlands of Scotland and the south and from there to the Channel tunnel suffered a severe setback last week when the rail bridge in the town of Inverness was washed away in the flooding that occurred. Will the Minister give an undertaking that all available finance will be made available to British Rail and ScotRail to ensure that that bridge is reconstructed as fast as possible because the great worry in the north now is that if it takes up to a year—

Mr. Speaker: Order. This question is about the Channel tunnel, but the hon. Gentleman's question is wide of it.

Mr. Kennedy: Without the bridge, there is no rail link to the Channel tunnel from Inverness.
Will the Minister ensure that the finance is available and that British Rail checks bridges of the same age at regular intervals to ensure that there is not a similar setback again?

Mr. Portillo: The safety point is well made and. I shall bring it to British Rail's attention. I know that my right hon. Friends the Secretaries of State for Transport and for Scotland have been in touch with each other about the bridge. We do not yet know anything about the costs that would be involved, but we shall stay closely in touch with the hon. Gentleman on this matter.

Thames (Barge Traffic)

Mr. Bowis: To ask the Secretary of State for Transport what discussions he has had with London riparian borough councils and the Port of London Authority concerning barge traffic on the Thames.

Mr. Portillo: The recent incident at Battersea is being investigated by a Department of Transport marine surveyor who has had discussions with the Port of London Authority. The authority is now restricting the number of barges that may be towed up river under Battersea bridge to one per tug, and I have asked the PLA to inform me of any other new measures that it proposes to take.

Mr. Bowis: Will my hon. Friend confirm that two such measures might well relate to the competence of pilotage on the Thames and the use of the tides? I understand that in this instance the pilot came up too late on the tide and the barge was too close to the bridge structure. Will my hon. Friend further confirm whether the Department has contingency plans against the day when another such incident occurs and the bridge perhaps being completely destroyed?

Mr. Portillo: The marine surveyor will have to consider whether there was a culpable failure and make recommendations arising from that. The PLA has already said that tow barges should come up river as early as possible on the flood tide. In the unlikely event of the bridge collapsing, the PLA would need to take emergency action and it is well aware of that.

Mr. Spearing: Does the Minister agree that to come up early on the tide is navigationally impractical and that the best advantage is in coming up near the top of it? Does he further agree that, pending protective measures to bridges such as Battersea, which is relatively narrow, such accidents on the Thames are rare and when they occur they cause headlines, which illustrates the safety of water transport by barge on the Thames in general?

Mr. Portillo: The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. Battersea bridge had been damaged on six occasions this century before the 1988 accident, so it is a fairly rare occurrence. I am not competent to comment on the hon. Gentleman's first point beyond saying that it is the PLA which recommended that tugs should come upstream as early as possible on the flood tide.

Mr. Squire: In addition to echoing the points made by the hon. Member for Newham, South (Mr. Spearing), may I ask my hon. Friend if he will further confirm that it is in everyone's interest that we continue to send domestic refuse down river by barge, rather than attempting to bring it back on to the roads and increase the already impossible congestion?

Mr. Portillo: That is a good point. The barges keep a large number of lorries off the roads, which is welcome to residents of the area.

Minibus Drivers

Mr. Ian Taylor: To ask the Secretary of State for Transport what steps he has taken to press for modification of the European Community requirement for minibus drivers to hold vocational entitlement under the proposed harmonised driver licensing system.

Mr. Peter Bottomley: We have pressed the European Commission at every level to avoid placing restrictions on the use of minibuses by the many voluntary groups, including those working with the disabled, who depend so heavily on them. We shall continue to do so and we aim to protect our present arrangements in the negotiations in the Council of Ministers.
There is no evidence that our present licensing arrangements for driving minibuses in any way prejudice safety. There is every evidence that voluntary minibuses aid mobility, especially for people with special needs.

Mr. Taylor: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for continuing to press this matter. Will he confirm that

minibuses are just about the safest form of transport and that we tend to use them more than other Community countries? The Commission's regulations will cause special hardship to charities for the elderly. That is just not good enough. Will my hon. Friend make that point forcefully to the Commission? Will he also arrange to put in the Library recent correspondence with the Commission on this matter?

Mr. Bottomley: Yes. My hon. Friend speaks for hon. Members on both sides of the House. Minibuses, often with six to 10 voluntary drivers, do a great deal of good for the elderly, the handicapped and the young. The letter which the previous Commissioner for Transport made public on 14 December was probably an aberration. His successor, the present Commissioner for Transport, will look with a fresh eye to see whether safety and mobility for the handicapped and others can be maintained and enhanced. I will put the exchange in the Library.

Mr. Higgins: Will my hon. Friend stress in Europe that harmonisation for its own sake is extremely damaging to the Community as a whole? Can he say whether the eventual decision on this will be by majority vote or unanimous decision?

Mr. Bottomley: The decision would be by majority vote if it came to that, but I have every confidence that on road safety grounds the Commission, Parliament and the whole of Europe will look to Britain, which has the best safety record. If the rest of the Community had our road safety record, 40 per cent. fewer people would have died last year. In other countries, the casualty rate is rising, not falling as it is in Britain, so we have something to contribute. On aid for the handicapped and others, we have learnt some lessons which others may want to copy. We do not know everything, but in this area we are the experts, we have the experience and we are right.

Channel Tunnel

Mr. John Hunt: To ask the Secretary of State for Transport when he next expects to meet the chairman of British Rail to discuss the Channel tunnel high-speed rail link; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Portillo: This question comes up at the regular meetings which Ministers have with the chairman from time to time. I am also in regular contact with the BR board member responsible for the development of this proposal.

Mr. Hunt: In view of the continuing anxiety and uncertainty on this matter, is it not high time that we were given a firm date for British Rail's announcement of the chosen route? As soon as that route is known, will my hon. Friend do all that he can—if necessary, by urgent amendment and uprating of the Land Compensation Act 1973—to facilitate speedy and generous compensation to those whose homes will have been blighted?

Mr. Portillo: In answer to my hon. Friend's first point, I agree that an urgent decision is required. There will be an announcement at the beginning of March. On the second point, it is extremely important—I impress this upon British Rail—that there should be an announcement of compensation terms at the same time as the announcement of the proposed route for the line.

Dame Peggy Fenner: Has my hon. Friend had an opportunity to study the submission made by Kent county council on behalf of all residents of Kent? May I have his assurance that he will instruct British Rail that whatever proposal it puts forward it should comply at least in minimal terms with the criteria in that submission?

Mr. Portillo: I and British Rail are looking forward to the Kent county council meeting of 23 February, at which I believe that it will confirm or amend the criteria that it is putting forward. Of course, I take those criteria seriously. Environmental protection for the people of Kent under any proposal is most important, and I have no reason to believe that British Rail is is any doubt about that.

Mr. Matthew Taylor: Is the Minister aware that 16 per cent. of the total cost of the TGV north route has been earmarked for environmental impact work? Will he ensure that there is a similar investment in this country to protect the people of Kent and elsewhere from the environmental impact of the route?

Mr. Portillo: I have no idea how those calculations were done in France. Of course, environmental protection will be included in the proposal, but it is only when British Rail makes a firm proposal that we shall know how much it has to spend on environmental protection over and above the cost of the basic line.

Mr. Tony Banks: Would it not be far more appropriate to have a public inquiry into the route through Kent and, indeed, the location of the second London terminal? This is far too important a matter to be left to British Rail. Has the Minister studied route 5 to see whether it would be environmentally less damaging than the other options being considered?

Mr. Portillo: I cannot accept that the matter is too important to be left to Parliament, which is what we are doing. This will be a matter for a private Bill, which is the appropriate means of settling it. I, too, believe that the people of Kent have suffered enough uncertainty already. The important thing is to bring the uncertainty to a conclusion. That will be done when British Rail makes a firm proposal in March. Discussions will continue thereafter, and then a private Bill will be introduced into Parliament for full discussion here.

Mr. Gerald Bowden: Although I recognise the importance of proper links between the Channel tunnel and the rest of the country, does my hon. Friend recognise that proposals to run heavy freight and high speed passenger trains at speeds above 100 mph along embankments, viaducts and bridges, and over the homes, houses and heads of my constituents, are unacceptable and that they will be opposed vigorously in the House? If there is any lesson to be learnt from the dreadful tragedy at Clapham, it is that such a risk cannot be taken.

Mr. Portillo: My hon. Friend puts me in a difficult position, because we do not yet have a firm proposal on the table from British Rail, but I note his point. My hon. Friend asked about freight. It is proposed that the new line should be for passenger trains. One reason is that only passenger trains can move at high speeds. Freight trains cannot move at those speeds. One effect of putting only passenger trains on the new line will be to allow more room on existing lines for freight trains, which may mean fewer freight lorries on the roads of Kent.

Mr. Prescott: Will the Minister confirm that these expansive environmental safeguards for the rail link will have to be financed out of British Rail revenue? Will that not inevitably mean a low-cost solution that rides roughshod over the concerns of the people of Kent and south London? Such a major decision should not be left solely to British Rail. Is the hon. Gentleman giving serious consideration to the inquiry that I suggested, which may assist the House in making a decision about that route?

Mr. Portillo: It is not strictly true to say that the safeguards would have to be financed out of British Rail revenue. If British Rail were to propose building the line, it would have to be a commercial proposition that provided an acceptable rate of return. The House and Parliament will decide on what line is acceptable. Once that has been decided, we shall see whether it is commercial. That is the way it will be. The other possibility is that it will be built in the private sector with British Rail paying a toll to run across it. That again would not require British Rail finding money from its own resources.

Networker Trains

Mr. Jacques Arnold: To ask the Secretary of State for Transport what information he has as to when the new Networker trains will be in use; and on which lines they will operate.

Mr. Portillo: My right hon. Friend approved the purchase of the first Networkers—77 diesel vehicles for lines out of Marylebone—last Tuesday. These units will enter service in 1990. British Rail hopes to begin operating the first electric Networkers by 1991 in south-east London and north-west Kent.

Mr. Arnold: Does my hon. Friend accept that my constituents would be relieved finally to get a decision on the introduction of Networker trains on the north Kent line? Does he appreciate that they are well and truly fed-up with the dreadful conditions on commuter trains in north Kent?
While we are talking about better conditions, does my hon. Friend recognise that commuters not only in the Gravesham area, but throughout London, are concerned about security, especially in light of the disgraceful scenes over the weekend on the train from Bedford? Will my hon. Friend reassure us that efforts will be redoubled to avoid such security problems in future? Will he note that we take some comfort from the fact that at least one of the alleged perpetrators has now been apprehended?

Mr. Portillo: I look forward to a proposal from British Rail for the Networkers, but I have told my hon. Friend what the position is.
A man has been charged in connection with the incident on the Bedford to King's Cross train at the weekend, and I understand that further arrests are expected. I understand that four men are in custody in connection with the Clapham Common stabbings and that six men have been arrested over the weekend in connection with the fight on the train in Scotland.

Mr. Lord: When considering these new Networker trains, and bearing in mind the increase in crime to which my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Mr. Arnold) referred, will my hon. Friend take immediate steps to ensure that train drivers can be kept in permanent contact


by telephone with the stations along their route and the emergency services? In this age of modern sophisticated telecommunications equipment, it is ridiculous that we cannot have this obvious safeguard for passengers and crew.

Mr. Portillo: It is certainly British Rail policy to equip new trains with radio communications for drivers and to fit that equipment to some existing trains. The Bedford to King's Cross train involved in the incident was equipped with a radio. The driver was able to radio ahead and the police were then able to meet the train at King's Cross station.

Mr. Spearing: In respect of the new Networker multiple unit electric trains, will the hon. Gentleman speak to his right hon. Friend about the future standards of seating? Is he aware that some of the new trains from other London termini, though they are faster and perhaps smoother than the stock which they are replacing, have less seating room and are less comfortable for travellers? Is that not a step backwards? Will the hon. Gentleman look into the seating design of the proposed Networker stock?

Mr. Portillo: I will look into that matter, but I believe that the hon. Gentleman is being a little grudging. We are talking about a major reinvestment, which will constitute a major improvement in the travelling circumstances of many thousands of people coming into London in the rush hour.

Sir Trevor Skeet: Will my hon. Friend the Minister bear in mind that security is the most important aspect for people travelling from Bedford? They will not use the line at all if their lives are not secure. Will my hon. Friend assure us that British Rail intends to adopt some innovative measures? Whether British Rail accepts the idea of Guardian Angels on the trains or considers any other method, will my hon. Friend assure us that some method is adopted?

Mr. Portillo: My hon. Friend will agree that it is most important that criminals should believe that they are likely to be apprehended. I am sure that he will welcome the news that progress is being made with the investigation. My hon. Friend will be aware that the line has not had a record of serious crime hitherto, so the incident took the police by surprise. Nonetheless, they have reacted with great swiftness to an extremely serious incident.

Mr. Prescott: Will the new Networker trains have guards? That was the element which was so obviously missing in the deplorable Bedford line incident at the weekend. Does he accept that the cuts in staff and police levels have contributed to encouraging an increase in violence on our railway system, with the result that the steamer gangs see our rail system as a soft touch? Will the Minister now tell British Rail that it will forgo the £200 million cut in public subsidies this year? Will he ensure that the moneys are redirected to increasing staffing levels and safety standards to improve security on our railway system, thus making an increase in safety standards a higher priority than the saving of money?

Mr. Portillo: The Networkers will be one-man operated. They will be associated with the new radio equipment I have mentioned, which is extremely important in combating crime. There is no evidence that there is more crime on one-person operated trains than on

other trains. When I took the opinion of a senior police officer this morning on whether any difference would have been made if there had been a guard on the train, his reply was, "The guard would have taken a serious beating."

Mr. Jack: My hon. Friend will be aware that the Networker type of train has sliding electrically operated doors. The same type of doors contributed to an accident that resulted in the death of an elderly lady at St. Anne's railway station. Will my hon. Friend undertake that he will consider carefully the representations that I have made to him for a full railway inspectorate inquiry into that matter and into other safety matters that involve sliding doors?

Mr. Portillo: I am taking extremely seriously the matter on which my hon. Friend has corresponded with me. I am discussing it with the railway inspectorate.

Settle-Carlisle

Mr. Matthew Taylor: To ask the Secretary of State for Transport if he will make a statement on the future of the Settle-Carlisle line.

Mr. Portillo: Not yet. We are still considering British Rail's closure proposal and related matters.

Mr. Taylor: Is the Minister aware that those who are involved in the holiday business in the area, as well as those who use the line daily, are having a blight cast upon their work because of continuing uncertainty? Tour operators have lost bookings because they cannot guarantee that the line will be open from May to October. The continuing uncertainty is not helped by press speculation that the Minister has found a solution about which he will not tell the House. Will the Minister reveal whether the speculation is sourced from his Department and when an announcement will be made?

Mr. Portillo: I am not responsible for the speculation which has appeared in the newspapers. I am sorry to hear about blight. The hon. Gentleman will know that I had to give the most serious undertakings that I would consider all the evidence that is put before me, and there is voluminous evidence. It would be wrong for me to reach a decision until I have gone through the evidence carefully.

Mr. Waller: Although it seems unlikely now that a single operator could take over the Settle-Carlisle line and run it, will my hon. Friend have close discussions with bodies such as the passenger transport authorities, the county councils and the tourist boards to ascertain whether they can come together, with the support of the Government, to find a way of saving what is, by any standards, an important part of the British heritage?

Mr. Portillo: Yes. The first thing that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has to do is to reach a decision on the application that has been made by British Rail to suspend its services. A number of people have been in touch with us, including the West Yorkshire PTA.

Mr. Dalyell: In the voluminous evidence, what is the notional figure for the annual maintenance of the Ribblehead viaduct?

Mr. Portillo: I am not prepared to reveal one part of the evidence in isolation from the rest. British Rail's closure


proposal has been published. If the hon. Gentleman cares to read that, he will find some of the figures for which he may be looking.

Channel Tunnel

Mr. Yeo: To ask the Secretary of State for Transport what recent representations he has received regarding a high-speed rail link from the Channel tunnel.

Mr. Portillo: I have received a large number of representations about British Rail's proposals for rail links to the Channel tunnel.

Mr. Yeo: Does my hon. Friend agree, while understanding the concern of those whose homes may be destroyed, that the national construction of a high-speed rail link offers enormous environmental benefits and improvements? It will give us a chance to transfer some traffic from road to rail, and there is the possibility that there will be fewer vehicles, including coaches, cluttering Kent's roads.

Mr. Portillo: My hon. Friend has made a most interesting point. Even without the new line, rail freight is expected to more than triple. There could be 20 trains a day in each direction through the tunnel and that would mean that 1,500 fewer lorries a day would be required in Kent. With the new line there will be more room on the existing railway network for freight trains. Therefore, there will be less of a tendency for that freight to drift back on to the roads of Kent.

Mr. Andrew F. Bennett: Does the Minister accept that it would be a travesty of justice to promote such a rail link by way of a private Bill? We need a planning inquiry. If a private Bill were used to promote the new line that would bring the procedures of this House into disrepute. Does he agree that it would be absolutely impossible to find four hon. Members to sit in a judicial capacity on the Bill who do not have an interest in the matter? Will he ensure that there is a proper planning inquiry and that the new line is not promoted through the back door route of a private Bill?

Mr. Portillo: No. I absolutely disagree with the hon. Gentleman. Although some proposals have been put forward by a joint committee which we will have to consider very seriously, at the moment there is no method for the promotion of a new railway line other than by a private Bill.

Mr. Rowe: Is my hon. Friend aware that for the past six months British Rail has engaged in what it calls consultations, but which the rest of us would call confrontation, which has added nothing to the argument? As a consequence, when British Rail finally announces the route, it will not have gained any more information or taken any notice, as far as I can see, of what anyone else is saying. Will my hon. Friend, in those circumstances, ensure that British Rail considers other routes, such as, route 5, which has been carefully designed, before it takes its decision?

Mr. Portillo: British Rail should consider its route very carefully including any alternatives which are put forward. However, my hon. Friend rushes to judgment when he says that British Rail has not been listening. He must wait until he sees the proposed line, and then judge for himself.

Oral Answers to Questions — ATTORNEY-GENERAL

cohabitation

Mr. Fraser: To ask the Attorney-General what steps are currently being undertaken by his Department or that of the Lord Chancellor in relation to increasing the rights which flow from cohabitation.

The Solicitor-General (Sir Nicholas Lyell): The Law Commission is currently reviewing the law relating to intestacy, to the occupation of the home, and to domestic violence. This review will include the question of what rights should follow from cohabitation as well as from marriage.

Mr. Fraser: Will the Solicitor-General confirm that it is the intention of the Lord Chancellor's Department to increase the obligations of common law partners in the forthcoming legal aid regulations? Does he agree that inter vivos rights of common law partners should be increased. For example, a common law wife who has lived in a home owned by her common law husband for many years should have rights of security and proprietary rights in the matrimonial home as well and, so as not to be sexist, vice versa?

The Solicitor-General: People in that position already have some rights and the Law Commission is considering whether they should have further rights. Such rights as they have at the moment will be taken into account appropriately when the regulations to which the hon. Gentleman referred come forward.

Mr. Holt: Does my hon. and learned Friend agree that whatever the rights are, it is very important that the mechanics match those rights? Is he satisfied with the work of the legal aid office in Newcastle which allegedly dictated a letter on 19 January, typed it on 1 February and which was finally delivered on 9 February after I had contacted the office by telephone? That communication related to the "tug-of-love" case between one of my constituents and a child's mother. Does my hon. and learned Friend agree that that case was put in jeopardy, whatever the rights may be, because of the length of time involved?

The Solicitor-General: That seems a far cry from cohabitation. However, if my hon. Friend will write to me, we will look at the case.

Serious Fraud Office

Mr. Rooker: To ask the Attorney-General when he last met the director of the serious fraud office; and what matters were discussed.

The Attorney-General (Sir Patrick Mayhew): Today, Sir. We discussed matters of departmental interest.

Mr. Rooker: Will the Attorney-General confirm whether he has discussed with the director of the serious fraud office the continuing delay in reaching a decision on his inquiries regarding the Department of Trade and Industry's report on the House of Fraser? Will he also confirm that the dilatory actions of former Ministers, Sir Alex Fletcher and the right hon. Member for Chingford (Mr. Tebbit) allowed known crooks to buy the House of Fraser? Are they now co-operating fully with the serious fraud office?

The Attorney-General: As to the less tendentious part of the hon. Gentleman's question, the matter to which he referred at the beginning featured among those that I discussed today. Police inquiries requested by the Director of Public Prosecutions are continuing.

Sir Anthony Grant: Did my right hon. and learned Friend discuss with the Director of Public Prosecutions any need for additional staff in his Department to deal with major fraud cases? It has taken an appalling length of time to bring the Guinness scandal to trial.

The Attorney-General: No, Sir. That was not among the matters discussed, because the director of the serious fraud office has made no representation to me that he needs additional staff. The establishment of the serious fraud office has vindicated the legislation that permitted it, because matters that are now the subject of prosecution—including the prosecution arising out of the Guinness affair—would not have been referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions under the previous arrangements.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: What is happening in the case of Mr. Kunwar Chander Jeet Singh, who ran Ravendale Group plc and City Investment Centres, and who, in the over-the-counter market and in other share dealings, defrauded thousands of people of their money? When will that fraudster be prosecuted?

The Attorney-General: If the hon. Gentleman wishes to ask a question about a specific case, it will be to my advantage and, I suspect, to that of the House, if he addressed his question directly to that case.

Director of Public Prosecutions

Mr. Holt: To ask the Attorney-General when he last met the Director of Public Prosecutions; and what was discussed.

The Attorney-General: Today, Sir. We discussed a variety of matters of departmental interest.

Mr. Holt: Will my right hon. and learned Friend say whether one of those matters was bringing back to this country Mr. James Draper, to serve the two-year prison sentence that was imposed upon him for contempt of court, after he and others defrauded many people in this country?

The Attorney-General: Yes, Sir. That matter was discussed today. For the assistance of my hon. Friend, I can say that the Vice-Chancellor made an order committing Mr. Draper, in his absence, to prison for two years for civil contempt of court. Extradition cannot be ordered from any country for civil contempt, even if it results in an order of imprisonment. The Vice-Chancellor's judgment and a separate report by Department of Trade and Industry inspectors into the affairs of two companies, known as Milbury plc and Westminster Property Group, which covered similar ground, have been studied by counsel, who concluded that a police investigation should not be commenced, nor extradition sought, in respect of alleged criminal offences committed by Draper. The Crown prosecution service agrees with that view.

Mr. Cohen: Is the Attorney-General aware that London Labour right hon. and hon. Members today met Sir Peter Imbert, Commissioner of Police of the

Metropolis, who acknowledged that to tackle racial harassment effectively, a much stronger policy is needed from the Director of Public Prosecutions, so that more of those people who perpetrate racial harassment will be prosecuted?

The Attorney-General: The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis has not yet reported that meeting to me, nor any opinions such as that which the hon. Gentleman identifies. I look forward to reading any communication from the commissioner.

Mr. Adley: Does my right hon. and learned Friend recall the great courtesy that he showed me, when we met to discuss the case of my constituent, Mrs. Christine Sellers, and the possibility of bringing a criminal prosecution against the surgeon, Mr. Cook? My right hon. and learned Friend's advice was that she should bring a civil case against him. Is my right hon. and learned Friend aware that the case has now been heard, and that judgment is expected later this week? If Mrs. Sellers wins, will my right hon. and learned Friend be willing again to see me, as was anticipated in the first place?

The Attorney-General: I am always willing and anxious to see my hon. Friend. It is a labour of love to extend courtesy to him.

Attorney-General of the Irish Republic

Mr. Dalyell: To ask the Attorney-General when he last met the Attorney-General of the Republic of Ireland; and what matters were discussed.

The Attorney-General: On Thursday, 29 September 1988. As I stated in my answer of 23 January 1989 to the hon. Gentleman, we had a constructive meeting in regard to matters of concern to our respective responsibilities—in particular, extradition between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

Mr. Dalyell: As the right hon. and learned Gentleman has possibly had a telephone conversation this morning with the Irish Attorney-General, what message does the right hon. and learned Gentleman have for lawyers and solicitors in Northern Ireland in the light of last night's tragedy?

The Attorney-General: Last night's tragedy should and does arouse disgust throughout the civilised community. It is, of course, most deeply felt among lawyers but also, I would judge, widely shared throughout the Province.

Sir Raymond Gower: Is my right hon. and learned Friend able to take any steps to bring Mr. Ryan to justice through a trial, either in the Irish Republic or in this country?

The Attorney-General: The Irish Attorney-General has had the papers concerning Mr. Ryan since last month. Those papers were sent with a view to his prosecution being considered by the Irish Director of Public Prosecutions.

Mr. Winnick: Arising from what the Attorney-General has just said to my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell), does he agree that the murder last night of a solicitor is a new escalation of the murderous violence in the Province? Does he also agree that those who practise law in Northern Ireland have a duty and a responsibility


to their clients? Are not those responsible for the murder demonstrating once again that, whether the violence comes from the Republican or the Loyalist side, these murderers have no respect for the rule of law?

The Attorney-General: The hon. Gentleman's last remark was quite correct. However, I do not know whether the murder was an escalation of the violence that has beset the Province for so many years. It is certainly an example of violence on a disgusting and totally unacceptable scale, which right hon. and hon. Members from both sides of the House wish to do all that they can to suppress, consistent with the rule of law.

Oral Answers to Questions — OVERSEAS DEVELOPMENT

Malawi

Mr. Greg Knight: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs when he last visited Malawi; and if he will make a statement.

The Minister for Overseas Development (Mr. Chris Patten): I visited Malawi at the end of last month. I saw a range of British-financed development projects and technical projects and technical experts, and confirmed to Malawian Ministers our continuing commitment to help Malawi's development programme. British aid to Malawi, including help for Mozambican refugees, amounted to £25 million in 1987, the latest year for which full figures are available.

Mr. Knight: Is not one of the biggest problems facing Malawi its need to improve transport links to the coast? Is there anything that the British Government can do to assist in that matter?

Mr. Patten: I wholly agree with my hon. Friend. I saw for myself the importance to Malawi's economy of improving transport links. That is why we intend to spend just over £13 million on the northern transport corridor linking Malawi to Dar-es-Salaam. We have also made a contribution to the rehabilitation of the Nacala line, and will probably be able to do more to support that project as well.

Sir Jim Spicer: My hon. Friend will know all our aid is directed on a bilateral basis where it is most needed. Why does the European Community, particularly in the case of black South African townships, insist on feeding its aid through a third party, which then has the power to direct where the aid should go? Would not our approach be more satisfactory?

Mr. Patten: We are pressing, both through our own bilateral contributions to projects in South Africa and through the European Community, to ensure that that aid goes to education and social projects where it is most needed. We shall, as my hon. Friend suggested, be spending on our own substantial programme and we have already committed about £25 million to bilateral projects in South Africa in the five years to 1992.

Lomé IV

Mr. Andrew F. Bennett: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will make a statement on current progress in negotiations on Lomé IV.

Mr. Chris Patten: Negotiations on a successor to the third Lomé convention, which expires in February 1990, were opened formally in October last year. The first European Community—African Caribbean Pacific ministerial negotiating meeting, which I shall be attending, is in Brazzaville later this week.

Mr. Andrew F. Bennett: When the Minister attends the meeting, will he press the European Commission to consider carefully the implications of the 1992 single market and its impact on African, Caribbean and Pacific countries? Will he ensure that those Third world countries do not lose out in the single market? Does he recognise the grave danger that the fat cats of Europe will get the cream and milk while the Third world countries will be left with only a cracked saucer?

Mr. Patten: I find myself in the unusual position of agreeing with a good deal of what the hon. Gentleman said. We have to make absolutely certain that 1992 does not create a fortress Europe, as my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has made clear. We have to do all that we can in the re-negotiation of the Lomé convention to ensure that we liberalise the existing trade arrangements where we can. We have set out our thoughts on that, and in particular we have made clear our views on bananas and the importance of guaranteeing the position of our traditional suppliers in 1992 and thereafter.

Miss Lestor: While the hon. Gentleman is in the mood to agree with my hon. Friend, may I ask whether he has had time to look at the charter for Lomé IV produced by the world development movement? Two of the points in that charter may well be in line with what he is thinking, and I should welcome his comments. First, the Economic Community, in discussing 1992, should publish a report on the anticipated costs and benefits to African Caribbean Pacific states and fully compensate those that are adversely affected, and secondly that the Economic Community should abolish all remaining tariffs and non-tariff barriers on processed products from ACP states. As the Minister shares the Opposition's concern about the move towards 1992, I should welcome his co-operation on those matters.

Mr. Patten: I agree with a good deal of the world development movement's charter on the Lomé renegotiations. In regard to tariffs, as I said earlier, we are pressing for further liberalisation. For example, we are pressing for rum to be treated like other industrial products. It seems inconceivable that after 1992 we could continue with a quota on rum and with compartmentalisation. I have mentioned the importance of liberalising the arrangements. The hon. Lady also mentioned an economic assessment of the consequences of 1992. We have argued with ACP countries that they should benefit from a larger and more dynamic market after 1992. The European Community has to help them develop their own processing and manufacturing capacity, for example, by simplifying the existing rules of origin.

Dame Peggy Fenner: May I say how much I appreciate my hon. Friend's concern about the effects of 1992? Will


he pay particular attention to the Madrid appeal—the document produced by the 22 countries of the Council of Europe in their campaign for greater public awareness in the North-South campaign?

Mr. Patten: That was a very useful campaign, particularly as my hon. Friend the Member for Medway (Dame P. Fenner) played a part in drawing up that declaration. We were pleased to be able to make a small contribution to that campaign, which quite properly accomplished its objectives.

Oral Answers to Questions — OVERSEAS DEVELOPMENT

International Debt

Mr. Cohen: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what action he proposes to take in the light of the World Bank's report on the growth of international debt.

Mr. Chris Patten: We shall continue to play our full part in implementing the internationally-agreed strategy on debt. We will maintain support through the aid programme for important initiatives recently adopted for the poorest debtors, in which Britain took a leading role.

Mr. Cohen: That is some strategy. The Minister will be aware that that World Bank report showed that the poorer nations paid the richer nations some $43 billion last year and because of compound interest they were still $39 billion further in debt. The Government's strategy is to export privatisation, to soak the resources of those countries and leave them even further in debt. Is that not a recipe for poverty capitalism, rather than popular capitalism?

Mr. Patten: Unusually, the hon. Gentleman is a little wide of the mark. The figures which he quoted are certainly misleading as they take no account of grant aid or of the ability of better off developing countries to repay their debts. The net capital flows to sub-Saharan African countries were strongly positive throughout the 1980s. Even after deducting interest payments they amounted to $15 billion in 1987, the last year for which we have figures. These days very few people would agree with the hon. Gentleman about the importance of market forces. His views seem to be more in line with those of Mr. Ligachev than with those of President Gorbachev.

Mr. Wells: The House owes my hon. Friend a great debt of gratitude for the initiative that he and the Chancellor of the Exchequer have taken to put on the international scene the initiative on sub-Saharan debt, which has been taken a step further at Toronto. Does my

hon. Friend believe that the time is now ripe for a further initiative in that area, and that we should extend the initiative on sub-Saharan debt to other countries, such as Guyana in South America? Can he make a statement about that? Is he prepared to take any steps in relation to the debts owed to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund?

Mr. Patten: It is important to distinguish between the poorest and the most indebted countries and those which are rather better off. It is also important to distinguish between debts that are owed to Governments and international organisations and those which are owed to commercial banks. Whatever happens, I would not endorse the transfer of risks from banks to taxpayers.
We have announced that we have committed support to the programme, which we hope will get off the ground, to encourage economic reforms in Guyana. Canada has led the exercise, but we have said that we will support an agreed IMF-World Bank programme in Guyana. I hope that we can start one very soon.

International Development Association

Mr. Welsh: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will make a statement on current progress in negotiations for the replenishment of the International Development Association.

Mr. Patten: Negotiations will start in Washington later this month. We hope that they will be successfully concluded by the autumn.

Mr. Welsh: I wish the Minister all success in the negotiations and hope that they are successful for the association. Is the Minister aware that, in 1979, we contributed 10 per cent. of this fund and that, in the early 1980s, we reduced that contribution to 6·7 per cent. because we had a weak economy? Now, the Chancellor of the Exchequer says that the economy is the strongest it has ever been. Does the Minister agree with the Chancellor? If so, will he renegotiate a 10 per cent. contribution in the next round of negotiations?

Mr. Patten: Of course I agree with my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer about the strength of the economy. I also agree with what he told the IMF-World Bank development committee recently. He said that we
believe a substantial replenishment is justified to maintain the Bank's concessional lending to its very poorest members, especially in Africa".
I strongly agree with my right hon. Friend. We shall certainly play our traditional part in accomplishing such a replenishment.

Point of Order

Mr. D. N. Campbell-Savours: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. You will recall that, some weeks ago, the hon. Member for Thanet, South (Mr. Aitken) raised the issue of the six Conservative Members who have been identified as a security risk by the Security Service. You will recall also that I have raised this matter repeatedly—at column 866 on 24 January, column 1041 on 25 January, columns 1185 and 1204 on 26 January and column 122 on 30 January. You have given me rulings on this matter several times. The first time you advised me to go to the Leader of the House. He told me that he could not answer questions on matters of security. I accept the answer that he gave me. You then ruled on a further point of order which 1 raised with you, and said that I should take the matter to the Procedure Committee. I went to the Procedure Committee, and I have to advise you of its reply. It said:
It was the unanimous view of the Procedure Committee that in no way could consideration of this, or any matters concerned with security, fall under the normal interpretation of the terms of reference of our Committee.
You will understand, Mr. Speaker, that my case has always been that if Members of Parliament are not fit to be Ministers because they cannot be trusted with classified material, which was the effect of the statement made by the hon. Member for Thanet, South, members of Select Committees who may have been subject to the same scrutiny should not have access to classified information. I have identified in the Chamber at least two Committees to which classified material is made available. Indeed, this afternoon, in the Public Accounts Committee, we shall once again be examining classified material. May I put it to you, Mr. Speaker, that we need a ruling whereby this matter can be opened up?
As you will understand, I am not satisfied if some Members of this House whom the security services do not regard as trustworthy are to be given access to classified material. We know that at the moment there are six such Members. We know not who they are; we know only that they are Conservatives, and in saying so, I am not scoring political points—[interruption.] It was the hon. Member for Thanet, South who said that these six Conservative Members had been identified by the security services.
All I want is a ruling whereby we can move forward. Will you please consider this matter, Mr. Speaker, and tell me to which Committee I can go next to have it examined further?

Mr. Speaker: I do not think I can help the hon. Member. I have given him two suggestions, but, as he well knows, it is not my role to indulge in giving advice as to tactics. I can only suggest that he might now seek to win time for a private Member's motion, which might enable him to develop the matter further. I cannot give a ruling on something over which I have no authority.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: You suggest, Mr. Speaker, that I should seek to win time for a private Member's motion in a ballot of potentially 640 Members, to deal with an urgent matter concerning Committees of this House. However, today, and over the next few weeks, classifies: material will be examined. Surely it is wrong for the House to have to wait for some form of adjudication on these

matters. That material may fall into the hands of Members whom the security services have identified as unreliable. This is a matter for the House of Commons, not for the Government, and I ask you, Mr. Speaker, to give us a ruling as to which Committee we can go to next.

Mr. Speaker: The hon. Member must pursue this with the Leader of the House. He cannot pursue it with me; it is not a matter for me. He has taken it to the Select Committee, which has said that it is unable to deal with it. I cannot deal with it either.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: Mr. Speaker, you could advise me—

Mr. Speaker: I cannot, and there is no point in the hon. Gentleman's pursuing the matter. I have no authority to do it.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: In your reply, Mr. Speaker, you referred to the need for me to go to the Leader of the House. The Leader of the House has said:
The hon. Gentleman knows the answer that he will get. I am not prepared to comment on matters of security, but, as the hon. Gentleman will be well aware, it is ultimately for the House to decide on membership of Select Committees."—[Official Report, 26 January 1989; Vol. 145, c. 1185.]
The House cannot decide upon this matter because the House does not have information as to who these six Conservative Members of Parliament are—nor, indeed, does the Committee of Selection.
We cannot just allow this matter to fall by the wayside. It is important. We are talking about classified material. We are talking about information relating to defence contracts, perhaps even contracts such as the one on which you, Mr. Speaker, had to rule a year and a half ago—the Zircon project. How do we know that those six Conservative Members of Parliament do not have access to that information? We know that they could not get it as Ministers, because, according to the hon. Member for Thanet, South, their appointments were blocked by the security services. I am trying to find out—

Mr. Speaker: Order. The hon. Member is taking up private Members' time. This matter arose in a speech made by the hon. Member for Thanet, South, (Mr. Aitken). I have no idea whether the hon. Member was right or wrong. What he said was his responsibility not mine. I have no authority to do as the hon. Gentleman wishes me to do. He must find ways of pursuing this matter other than through the Chair.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: There is another way that I can pursue the matter, but the problem is that because I do not have a name and therefore cannot approach one of the Members, perhaps privately, to make a complaint to the Select Committee on Privileges, I am not in a position to press the matter. You could advise the Select Committee on Privileges to examine this matter in a general sense without any Member having to lodge a complaint.

Mr. Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman knows the rules about that. If he maintains that it is a matter of privilege, he should raise it in the appropriate manner, which is to write to me about it. Before he does so, however, I have to say to him that I cannot be held responsible for what hon. Members may allege in the Chamber, provided that what they say is in order. The hon. Gentleman is being very unfair to his colleagues by


taking time out of private business.[Interruption.] There may come a day when he finds himself in a similar position.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: You say that the hon. Member for Thanet, South made a statement that perhaps was unsubstantiated. He said:
Just in case Labour Members think that these kinds of mistakes are totally confined to their side of the House and to Labour Prime Ministers, they may perhaps be interested to know that I was told … reliably".—[Official Report, 17 January 1989; Vol. 145 c. 190.]
The hon. Gentleman said "reliably," so it was not a question of conjecture. He made a specific allegation.

Mr. Speaker: Order. Very frequently hon. Members allege that they have reliable information and very frequently it turns out to be highly unreliable.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: rose—

Mr. Speaker: Order. I do not intend to hear any more about this matter.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: rose—

Mr. Speaker: I have already told the hon. Gentleman that I do not intend to hear any more about this matter.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: rose—

Mr. Speaker: I have already dealt with the matter.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: I am dealing with classified material.

Mr. Speaker: Order. I ask the hon. Gentleman to resume his seat.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: I am dealing with classified material.

Mr. Speaker: Again I ask the hon. Gentleman to resume his seat.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: rose—

Mr. Speaker: If the hon. Gentleman will not resume his seat, I shall have to ask him to leave the Chamber for the rest of this day's sitting.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: rose—

Mr. Speaker: Order. I order the hon. Member to leave the House for the remainder of this day's sitting.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: Am I being asked to leave the Chamber?

Mr. Speaker: Yes.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: I shall be back.

The hon. Member then withdrew.

Moral Values

Sir Hal Miller: I beg to move,
That this House recognises the different but complementary roles of the Church and State in our society; and calls on all sections of the Church, including that by law established, to fulfil their leading role in the promotion of moral values.
I move this motion with some diffidence, as I have no wish, nor is it any part of my purpose, to give offence. I am conscious that I am one of the frailer vessels on the Ecclesiastical Committee and I am most grateful that other hon. Members are to take part in the debate. I very much regret the absence of the Ecclesiastical Committee members. The Committee is to meet the archbishops later today. In particular I regret the absence of my right hon. Friend the Member for Selby (Mr. Alison) who has provided me with much help, encouragement and information, and who, I know, wished to take part in the debate. I acknowledge also my debt to the Earl of Lauderdale and my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer). None of them wishes, of course, to take any responsibility for my remarks.
All four of us are members of an organisation called Church In Danger, but the debate purposely goes wider than the Church of England, as is recognised by the presence of the Minister of State, Home Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Mr. Patten) who I am sure will lend wit, wisdom and a wider perspective to our deliberations. Despite the advice and fears of many of my hon. Friends about my temerity in raising the subject, I felt that I should take this opportunity to air matters that have been giving me cause for much concern.

Dame Elaine Kellet-Bowman: And many others, too.

Sir Hal Miller: The origin of the concern in my own case is the growing perception that Church spokesmen are speaking with a great deal of certainty in the realm of politics but with increasing uncertainty in the realm of things of the spirit. Thus, in the past year one diocesan newsletter in my diocese was headed "Tax Cuts are Immoral". Another was devoted to a consideration of our nuclear defence policy. Other bishops have attacked the deregulation of buses and the proposals that schools should opt out of local authority control and, most recently, I heard one bishop looking forward to attacking the proposals in the White Paper on health.
I am not, of course, objecting to the clergy's right to have political views or to express them, but they should not express those political views in their guise as clergymen or bishops, with the sacred authority thus implied. In other words, I do not believe that they have the right to speak on such matters from the pulpit or the throne. I find it odd and offensive that clerical spokesmen can, apparently, deny the basic beliefs of the creed, contemplate the ordination of divorced people—I speak as a divorced person—and purport to celebrate homosexual marriages.
It seems that the church is becoming a battleground—I nearly said playground—for activists with distinctively minority views. Labour Members are only too panfully aware, as reselection looms, of what that involves, and the Synod of the Church of England is in danger of attempting to give some of those views an elective authority that


cannot stand comparison with the authority of this House. We ceded authority to the Synod to manage Church affairs without interference from the House, not to run political campaigns, however sincerely felt. I shall come back to the question of establishment later.
I have been a Member of Parliament for 15 years, during which time I have seen at least three political theories in action. I ask myself how the Church can safely abandon the eternal for the obviously temporal.

Mr. William Powell: Will my hon. Friend give way?

Sir Hall Miller: No, as I am still in my introductory phase.
This apparent increase in the Church's concern about the political has been accompanied, in a curious transposition of roles, by an increase in state concern for the moral, such as state insistence on religious education in schools, which was questioned in the House of Lords by one of the Lord bishops. There has also been state insistence on the responsibility of the individual in a variety of spheres, in which my hon. Friend the Minister of State has played a part.

Mr. William Powell: Is it my hon. Friend's experience that those churches where the strongest spiritual message comes from the leadership are the fullest and those where the political message is most enhanced are the emptiest?

Sir Hall Miller: My hon. Friend has made his point. My understanding is that the churches where there are enthusiastic beliefs have full attendances.
I want shortly to turn to where I see the solution lies to the seeming contradictions, but I want first to deal with the moral basis of our present system of democratic capitalism. I speak as one who was originally reared on the Christian Socialism of F. D. Maurice and R. H. Tawney, supplemented—almost redeemed, I might add—by William Temple. We are now seeing the worldwide realisation that Socialist centralised planning and Socialist management have not only failed to deliver the economic goods and the means of ministering to the poor, but that the price in terms of human rights has been too high to pay for illusory equality.
In Russia, we see a move to provide greater rights, but political freedom may give rise to more demands than the still shackled economy can meet, while in China, economic processes are being freed first, giving rise to greater political demands than the state can perhaps meet. Therefore, we should be thankful that we and other advanced economies are living under a system of democratic capitalism. A free economy is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for a free society. By itself, a free economy is not a sufficient condition for a free society. Just as I have departed from Socialism in advocating a free economy, so I am departing from libertarianism.
The individual in the free economy needs to recognise his responsibilities as well as his rights. Here we see the field of play for moral values. The Socialist will seek to impose such values, but the libertarian will deny them. History ruefully records that states are no more moral than individuals' actions. I speak as a former civil servant. There is no greater morality in public rather than private expenditure, and state monopolies are no more admirable

and no more conscious of their customers than are private monopolies. We are up against the problem of self-will. As William Temple reminded us
There is no Christian solution to the problem of self-will.
It is what distinguishes us from the rest of creation. if we seek to deny it, we deny our creation. We have therefore to inform and guide it. That is the supreme role of the Church.
Too often, we politicians are presented with imperatives—for example, on abortion. I do not believe in abortion, and I hope that I would be able to sustain that belief in my own family life. But, as a politician, I must recognise not only that there is a minority of Church believers in this country but, more important, that there must be a policy to deal with situations in which abortions would otherwise be carried out in back streets, at high cost and with even greater danger to health.
Surely the Church can recognise original sin and self-will. How can the Church want us to legislate it away? We know that individuals have the potential for good and evil. Surely we should aim to increase the field of action of the good. Is it not our experience that individuals and small units—small groupings of people—when giving rein to the good, gain added strength? Should we not welcome possibilities for the provision of more flexible, more local bus services, for example, or return to schools more control over their own destinies? Should we not try to do the same thing in the Health Service? There should be more funding, certainly, but there should also be more say to those providing the service and more tapping of local enthusiasm, initiative and loyalty. Again, if tax cuts yield more revenue for more such expenditure, as has already happened, what is immoral about that?
As we achieve more economic freedom and more choice, the Church needs to remind us more of our responsibilities—our individual responsibilities. In our diversity of callings, we need the light of faith and the standards which the Church can provide.
So I come finally to the position of the Church of England, by law established. It is in a unique position to understand and minister to our needs, embedded as it is in our national life, being the result of the Act of Settlement 1700. As such it has a wider role than any other Church and in a real sense belongs to more people than merely to its members. Of course, it may, in effect, opt out of that position and responsibility. However, its schism would contain the potential for greater rifts. Therefore, I very much hope that its leaders will pull back from the merely partisan and the temporal and continue to promote the beliefs to which they gave express assent, as well as continuing to minister to us who have such need of them.

Mr. Eric S. Heller: I welcome the fact that we are discussing this matter today. Although the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sir H. Miller) has been moderate—I appreciate the fact that he says that he comes from a Christian Socialist background—unfortunately some of his colleagues, including some of his hon. Friends, still consider the Church of England to be the Tory party at prayer. They believe that politics should be left to Tory politicians and that only they have the right to be concerned with such matters. They believe that the Church of England should be concerned only with the saving of individual souls.
Their objective is either to maintain the status quo—as long as that equates with the present economic capitalist system—or, if changes are to take place, to remove the welfare state, trade union rights, the National Health Service, council house building and local authority rights in the interests of business, especially big business.
As somebody who was born into the Church—I am sure that I will die a member of the Church—I am passionately concerned with the interests of my Church. I believe that the Church has a right to involve itself in politics. Indeed, it has a duty to do so. The politics of the Church should be the politics of the early Christians. As Bishop Sheppard of Liverpool said in his book, there should be a "Bias to the Poor".
The hon. Member for Bromsgrove referred to Archbishop William Temple who said—I agree with him—that Christianity must
criticise actual institutions in the light of its own social principles, because it aims, not at the salvation of individuals one by one, but at that perfect individual and social welfare, which is called the Kingdom of God or the Holy City".
The arguments that we shall hear today against the bishops—we hear them regularly from Conservative Members—were used against Archbishop Temple in the past. I would like to draw the attention of the House to the fact that in 1934 William Temple wrote to The Times urging Neville Chamberlain, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, not to decrease income tax but to restore cuts which had been made in unemployment benefit. Neville Chamberlain was furious. That is perhaps a mild word to use. He was absolutely mad. He wrote to The Times:
When I read that letter I thought it was a pity that the Archbishop should suggest, as it seems to me he did by implication, that MPs require to be reminded of humanitarian feelings which otherwise would not occur to them.
The archbishop was right to send his letter. Members of Parliament, certainly some in the House today, have to be reminded of humanitarian feelings. If Christians are not genuinely concerned with the spiritual welfare of people, they must be concerned with the material needs of people. There is no contradiction in that.
Let me recall again the words of the Magnificat. It is much more revolutionary in some senses than the Communist manifesto. The Magnificat reads:
He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.
He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.
That does not fit in with some of the concepts which Tory Members may accept.
There was an interesting and great Roman Catholic professor of political economy of the university of Naples in 1890 who said in his book on Christian Socialism:
According to St. Jerome, opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessors.
That is not much different from what many Socialists have said in the past. I believe that to be true.
We should also remember that Acts 4, 32 states that the members of the first Christian communities were
of one heart and of one soul, neither said any of them that aught of the things he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common.
St. Cyprea in "Of Works and Arms" said:

When at the first beginnings of the Church the mind flourished with great virtues, when the soul of the believers burned with a glow of faith yet new, then they had all things common, they initiated the divine law, the equality of God the Father.
I believe that. That was why I am both a Christian and a Socialist. I do not find that the concepts I hold as a Socialist are any different from the beliefs I was brought up with.
Many Tory Members have got away from the basic concepts of the Christian Church. They have forgotten how it started and what it is about. It is true that at some stage it became the state religion, so turned into its opposite, like Marxism in Russia. It, too, became the opposite of what it began as. That is not new—unfortunately, it happens too often—but that does not mean that those who began the process—the early Christians and early Socialists—were wrong. It means that those who came afterwards distorted what those who began the process believed. That is what I have always thought. I see no difference between the two, and I find it difficult to understand the arguments of some Tory Members.
I do not disagree with what the Church has been doing recently. In the past I have been a critic of our bishops. Their report on the bomb was excellent. I am only sad that the Synod has overturned it. Fair enough, that is a democratic decision. I fully agree with chapter 3 of "Faith in the City" which deals with theological priorities.Paragraph 3.3 states:
In this country we are confronted by an acute form of relative poverty—officially recognised as 'multiple deprivation'—that is particularly concentrated in the Urban Priority Areas, and that is caused to a great extent by circumstances beyond the control of those affected by it. There is a clear Christian duty to respond to this situation and 'remember the poor' in our urban priority areas.
Can anybody disagree with that?
The report continues:
It is against the background of the excessive individualism of much Christian thinking in the nineteenth century that we must place Marx's perception that evil is to be found, not just in the human heart, but in the very structures of economic and social relationships. This perception is also found to a notable degree in the Old Testament [from which … Marx may have derived it] where there is explicit recognition of the inevitable tendency of the rich to get richer and the poor poorer unless some constraint is imposed to limit the freedom of individuals to profit without restraint from a market economy.
That is the right approach for my Church.
Today in Latin America, Asia and Africa there is a growth is what is called liberation theology. "Faith in the City" states:
To all of us, the example of Liberation Theology opens up the possibility that new priorities, as well as new methods, can restore to us a theology, that is truly relevant to the needs and aspirations of people today. Therefore we have to apply the new theology to the situation that exists in Britain today.
I accept that. We cannot talk about liberation theology only in Latin America. Hon. Members who saw last night's programme about the Sudan will have been made ill. Everyone who is a genuine Christian must have felt sick, seeing the poverty and misery that exists in the Sudan, Ethiopia, Latin America and various parts of Asia.
What about our poverty? We cannot act to solve the problem too quickly. We are a rich nation. What about our poverty? We have to do something about it. Therefore, I agree with "Faith in the City" that we must concern ourselves equally with what is happening in our own country.
One example is housing. When I think of the Government's record and policy on housing, and of the needs of our people, I remember what the report says about housing. In the section headed "Public Housing: the Way Forward", paragraph 10.72 on page 250 states:
The great importance of the public housing ideal was that it broke the link between poverty and living conditions. The poor did not have to live in poor housing. But this link is now being re-established … Net capital spending was cut by 44 per cent. in volume terms between 1975–76 and 1979–80 and by 52 per cent. in cash terms between 1979–80 and 1984–85. The result is that the number of new homes started in the public sector has dropped over the last decade from 174,000 in 1975 to 38,000 in 1984. At the same time there has been a shift in expenditure away from the metropolitan districts and London in favour of the shire districts.
In the conclusion to the chapter on housing, the report states:
What is beyond dispute we believe is that a continuing emphasis upon home ownership alone will not solve the housing problems of the urban priority areas.
That is liberation theology as argued by the Church in Britain, and I believe that it is absolutely right.

Mr. Ian Gow: The passage which the hon. Gentleman, perfectly understandably, has just read to the House is the best illustration that one could find of where the Church—the best motives—is commenting upon matters that are very much within the judgment and responsibility of politicians, whether at local or at national level. Some of us would have been much happier if "Faith in the City" had directed its attention to saving the souls of the people rather than making political judgments on how housing might be improved.

Mr. Heffer: I am delighted that the hon. Gentleman said that, because he has made my point for me. If they want to save souls, they had better house the people properly. If they want to save souls, that had better give the people decent jobs and full employment. If they want to save souls, they had better become concerned with personal relationships and what is happening at home. That is what Christianity and Socialism are about. The hon. Gentleman has attacked the report, just as some of his hon Friends have attacked the bishops, precisely because they have asked vital questions that are apposite to the needs of the people. I believe that the Church has come down, rightly, on the side of doing something about the problems.
In his book "Essays on Christian Politics and Kindred Subjects", William Temple said:
It is not possible to limit Christianity to the individual alone. Christianity appeared in the world as a society. It was not indeed a society with a finished constitution presenting what officers it should have, or what its specific aims should be.
I agree with that.
Unlike some people in Moslem and other countries, I do not believe that Christians want to have a theocratic state. I do not agree with the Christian Democrats in Europe, who wish to involve themselves in political affairs and say, "This is what we shall impose on society." The hon. Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Gow) is as good a Christian as I am. I accept that people who have different political views are sincere Christians. We may argue about our interpretation of Christianity, but I do not want us as Christians to say that we shall impose our views on other people. I am sure that most other hon. Members will accept that. It is a question of our basic ideals of Christianity.

Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one of the basic ideals of Christianity is that there should be one man and one woman for life?

Mr. Heffer: I do not argue with that. I have done rather well in that regard. But I believe that Christians should have compassion and understanding for people who may move in different directions from ourselves When Conservative Members have strayed, I have been asked by the press for my views. I have said that it is a matter for them, not for me to sit in judgment. I am not God and I do not pretend to have Godlike powers. I look to Him to help me to come to my views on issues, but I do not sit easily in judgment on other people. One great problem is with people who suddenly find morality. That does not relate to the basic concepts of Christianity.
The Church has gone through many evolutionary phases. At times, it has become the opposite of what was intended. It began as the society of the poor. Later, it was transformed into the religion of the state, and it became all-powerful. A powerful universal state within states was defined by those who wanted to get back to its original principles. During the middle ages, a feeling developed that Christianity should be the poor man's charter. That feeling became the chief contributory cause of the rise of all the movements, whether they were Catholic or supposedly heretical, Franciscan or Waldensian, which were in being from the 13th century onwards. In Britain they were embodied in the ideas of Wycliffe and, in a practical way, in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Troelsch, who studied these movements, was led to describe the period of the later Middle Ages as the "Laiechristentum"—the time of the common man's Christianity.
Political struggles and involvement have been endemic in Christianity from the very beginning, and whether some like it or not, that is still the case today. The rise of Protestantism was part of the struggle for political freedom, for democracy and for the right to speak freely, which is now accepted by most Christians, no matter to which branch of the faith they belong.
The Church has a number of currents within it, the basic concept being the creation of God's kingdom on earth and need to create a society where things are owned in common and where people act together for the commonweal. At the same time, individuals have rights and minds of their own, and they must be given every facility to use them. That is the important point about Christianity. We were given free will. We must use that free will for the benefit of the mass of the ordinary people in society—the poor and the oppressed. I believe that the individual's rights must be part of the collective whole. Those rights, together with the obligations, must be accepted by all.
I shall read extracts from two poems which I believe are essential in understanding why the church and christianity must be involved in politics. George Lovelace, the leader of the Tolpuddle martyrs, was a Methodist preacher. I have never been a methodist, although my mother-in-law is one. After seven years transportation, which was, as it were, given to him by the State at that time, he responded with a poem, "God is Our Guide":
God is our guide, from field, from wave,
From plough, from anvil, and from loom;
We came, our country's rights to save, 
And speak a tyrant factor's doom; 
We raise the watchword liberty;


We will, we will, we will be free. 
God is our guide! No swords we draw. 
 We kindle not war's battle fires. 
By reason, union, justice, law, 
We claim the birthright of our sires; 
We raise the watchword, liberty, 
We will, we will, we will be free!!! 
George Lovelace was concerned about the morals of his children. He wrote to his wife Betsy:
Be satisfied, my dear Betsy, on my account. Depend on it, it will work together for good and we shall yet rejoice together. I hope you will pay particular attention to the morals and spiritual interest of the children. Don't send me any money to distress yourself. I shall do well, for He who is the Lord of the winds and waves will be my support in life and death.
I shall now read from the hymn or poem, however one looks at it, "Jerusalem" by Blake. It is something which we all sing with fervour in our churches and in our meetings. We must think about what it means:
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the Holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
That is what I believe. I believe that Christianity is about transforming society to make it better. The Church must be involved in politics. It must concern itself with what is happening around us. It must become up to date. If it has to decide on such issues as whether there should be women priests and whether those who are divorced should hold positions in the Church, it is because it must live in modern society. It does not mean that the basic concept is wrong, but that we must accept that the Church must be involved. If it is not involved, it cannot make the contribution that it should in building a new society—in building that Jerusalem—and creating a new world. That is what I believe, and that is why I became involved in this debate.

Sir John Stokes: I know what a good Christian and Englishman the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heffer) is, and I share his love of history. However, in all our history we are usually two sides—he would have been a Roundhead and I would have been a Cavalier, but still part of English history. I was much moved by what he said about "Jerusalem". Conservative Members sing that hymn, too.
I congratulate my hon. Friend and neighbour the Member for Bromsgrove (Sir H. Miller) on thinking of this motion and on introducing it so well. We rarely debate these important matters, but I have occasionally done so

on Adjournment debates. This subject is vital to our health as a nation and it is good that we should spend this afternoon considering it in detail.
When we consider today the condition of England on the one hand, we see a nation that has never been so prosperous, but, on the other, a society bedevilled by crime—much of it violent—drug-taking, drunkenness, vandalism, thuggery and gross dirt and untidiness in our streets and many other public places. Apart from other grave moral failings which have not been mentioned, there is divorce, which is increasing alarmingly, the break-up of families and also, I am afraid, some dishonesty, whether in high places or in low. We appear to have lost in our national life a lot of that cohesion in our towns and villages, which I remember as a boy before the war. We are not as neighbourly as we used to be, perhaps because of modern means of transport and the fact that people move house so often.
It is not, of course, all bad. For example, more is given to charity than ever before in our history. If there has been a falling-off in standards of behaviour and in our manners, why is that so? I believe that it must be because of the failure of parents in the home to bring up their children in the Christian virtues and with the appropriate moral standards.
The Church clearly has a great responsibility. Unfortunately, not only has the number attending services been falling for years, but the number of baptisms and confirmations has too. Although poll after poll shows that most people still believe in God, the Church is irrelevant in their lives.
I have always loved the Church. It supported me in the various crises of my life. I believe that in the end religion is a personal matter, although it has its social side. Ordinary people want to know about fundamentals—why they were born, what they are doing on this earth and how they can cope with tragedies if they come along. They want to know, too, how to deal with sin and evil and to know the means of salvation. Those are the essential matters about which they want to hear from the clergy. But do we hear about those things from our bishops and the clergy? Do they, for instance, denounce the rising divorce rate, fornication or selfishness, or do they hesitate to condemn such matters because it is, perhaps, not fashionable to do so'?
I often feel that the Church tries to compromise too much with the liberal and progressive thinking of the modern age, and hopes by that means that it can fill its churches. I am sure that that is not the right approach. The Pope certainly does not take that route. Perhaps we need among our bishops more John the Baptists.
I believe strongly in the establishment of the Church of England. To dismantle it would be enormously costly and complicated. It would do damage to those occasional churchgoers who in the last resort still depend upon the Church. The Church of England is a marvellous institution. It has a network of parishes covering the entire land and it is available to everyone who wishes to avail himself of it.
I am glad that the bishops are still in the other place, as that reminds us of our Christian heritage as a nation. That does not mean that I agree with everything that they say. There is something wrong with our present system of appointing bishops. Many committees are involved and there is the baleful influence of the General Synod. The old system of the Prime Minister's ecclesiastical secretary


taking soundings from all quarters was much better and ensured that all sections of the Church had a fair share and not only the modern section, as now. It is hard, for example, for a Prayer Book man or a man opposed to the ordination of women to be made a bishop or a dean. I was surprised and delighted the other day when I saw that the chaplain of the fleet had been appointed Bishop of Sodor and Man. The chaplains in the services know about life and death; they are familiar with real life. I am glad to see that one of them has been promoted.
We hear that not enough priests are coming forward for ordination and that the standard generally is not high enough. Pay has been much improved but it is still too low when compared with that which is received by many affluent factory workers.
We have heard much today about the Church and politics. Many of the clergy, including the higher clergy, seem obsessed with politics, to the detriment, I believe, of the spiritual. I accept that religion must cover all aspects of life, including politics, but politics alone is not enough and can be harmful. When an all too absorbing interest in politics is compounded by a lack of traditional Christian belief in a Church leader, we have a recipe for disaster. Some time ago there was a meeting between business men and the bishops and clergy. The churchmen asked, "What do you want of us?" The business men replied, quite simply, "Preach the gospel." That sums up my criticism of the present Church leaders.
What is called the Thatcher revolution of the past 10 years is liberating the energies of individuals who give of their best in their careers for themselves and their families on this earth. Why is the Church not making a similar appeal to individuals in spiritual terms? The Church still seems to cling to collectivist solutions, usually meaning more taxpayers' money being directed to every problem, although this has failed so often in the past and notably, and unfortunately, in Scotland. What ecclesiastical leader has there been in the past 10 years to have anything like the influence that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has had in the secular sphere, from the shop floor upwards? Would that we could have a leader in the Church as we have in politics.
Our schools bear a heavy responsibility for bringing up people in the Christian traditions. Church schools are vital, but all schools in England should teach Christianity and Christian morals. Unfortunately, that does not happen everywhere nowadays. I know that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science is trying hard in that regard.
Unfortunately, the prestige of the clergy has declined since I was born in a country rectory over 70 years ago. Equally unfortunately, the prestige of the teaching profession has declined also. We need our best people in these two professions. We must do all that we can to raise their standing and the respect in which they are held by the public, and above all by the parents of our children.
What about we politicians? What example are we setting? Is it an inspiring example in faith and morals? I shall spare my colleagues any further remarks on that difficult and delicate subject. In recent years, relations between the Church and the House have deteriorated. The Church of England has appeared soft on certain moral issues such as homosexuality among the clergy. A dangerous conflict is arising about the ordination of divorcees while their former spouses are still alive. I have

often felt that the ordinary Back Bencher appears more rigorous in these matters than some members of the clergy. That is a sad state of affairs.
Hon. Members may not realise that in some senses they are more representative of the man in the pew than members of the General Synod. I remember how hard some of us fought to try to save the Book of Common Prayer. We prophesied that it would disappear. It has now done so in about four out of every five of our churches, to the irreparable loss of the whole of England.
If bishops did their job properly, there would be no need for the General Synod. The laity could make their views known at parish level. I joined the Synod some years ago on the basis of, "If you can't beat them, join I hem." I have been somewhat disappointed. The Synod meets too often, it seldom discusses basic issues and it is frightfully expensive for the parishes to maintain. Moreover, it is building up a bureaucracy which poses dangers to the well-being of the Church. The Synod takes up too much time of the bishops and the higher clergy. Preferment often seems tied to performance in the Synod instead of in the field. I once asked a chaplain on the Falkland Islands what he thought of the Synod—I hesitate to quote his reply.
I cannot end on an altogether sad note. In spite of the secular and materialistic age in which we live, there is still a longing for religion among many people. Somehow the Church has to appeal more to the hearts and minds of men and women. It must concentrate on essentials. A great evangelical crusade is required in many parts of our land where religion has almost vanished.
I believe that we are still at heart a Christian nation. Christianity has helped to shape our national character and there is still a haze of Christianity over this island. We must all of us in this place help the Churches all that we can to return to historic Christian roots; otherwise, our future will be bleak indeed.

Mr. A. J. Beith: I am glad that the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sir H. Miller) has placed this matter before us for debate this afternoon. As the debate unfolds, we will hear a variety and diversity of Christian views ranging from Christian Socialist to High Tory. There is a great diversity of Christianity in the United Kingdom. There are the established Churches in England and Scotland—the one Episcopal, the other Presbyterian; there is no established Church in Wales or Northern Ireland and in all four nations there is a great diversity of Christian views and denominations increasingly working together.
I speak as a nonconformist, a dissenter, a Free Churchman. I do not have the hang-up about bishops which Conservative Members seem to have. Conservative Members seem to attribute an authority to bishops which causes them to react with increasing violence to anything which a bishop might say with which they disagree. The most vivid example of that must be the comments that surrounded "Faith in the City".
The hon. Member for Luton, North (Mr. Carlisle) said in response to "Faith in the City" that The Church of England was now being
run by a load of Communist clerics.
A Cabinet Minister was quoted as saying that "Faith in the City" was "pure Marxist theology."

The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. John Patten): Who was the Minister concerned?

Mr. Beith: I am sorry to say that he was not identified. I hope eventually to discover who it was. However, I can identify the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Adley), who questioned whether bishops, although decorative, were any longer entitled to be taken seriously as political commentators with a built-in right to sit in the House of Lords. I often think that it will not be the radical dissenters who disestablish the Church of England, but the Tory party as it discovers increasing disagreement between itself and a body which it somehow expects to support it. It is strange that Tory Members seem to believe that the Church of England exists to support them and give succour to their views.
There is a necessary diversity of Christian views on political solutions. It is inevitable that Christians applying their belief to politics will come up with different solutions and views.
There is also a diversity of religions in the nation, not all of which are Christian. I do not accept the view of those who claim that in an increasingly multicultural Britain Christian values have no relevance. That is a fallacy based on a mistaken notion about multiculturalism in Britain.
One of the products of multicultural Britain is a very large and strong West Indian-based Christianity which is vibrant and sees Christian values as highly relevant to modern society. There are also many Moslems who have much common ground with Christians in their belief about the importance of moral values. The Christian Churches should not go into retreat on moral issues simply because we now have a more diverse nation with Christians of other traditions and others with non-Christian religious views.
When the Prime Minister addressed the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, I saw evidence of this Tory desire to claim the support of the Church. I feel compelled to remind Tory Members that the Christian gospel is about challenge. It is about challenging individuals in personal responsibility, behaviour and spirituality. It is also about challenging those in authority to assess what they are doing in the light of very different claims to those which now seem to dominate them.
The hon. Member for Bromsgrove said that he did not question the right of clergy to hold political views—well, there is a concession for a start—but they should not express them in their clerical capacity. I wonder what the hon. Gentleman would have said to the Old Testament prophets. What would he have said as they railed against the evils of the societies in which they found themselves?
Perhaps he would have said, "You are not entitled to express these views in your capacity as a prophet. You may hold them privately, but you may not express them." What would the hon. Gentleman say to the priests in Poland who have supported Solidarity? I suppose he would say, "Of course they are entitled to hold those views, but they should not express them." Surely not. The Prime Minister has often welcomed the way in which the Church in Poland has supported Solidarity and she has welcomed the great alliance between Christianity and the desire for self-expression and democratic rights in Poland.
What would the hon. Member for Bromsgrove and his Friends say to Mother Teresa because she poses a challenge to our society on homelessness and abortion? She demands that we think again about those issues.

Would Tory Members say that she has no right to say those things in public because she is a member of a religious order and should therefore keep those things to herself? Surely not. Prophetic words uttered by a remarkable Christian like Mother Teresa or by people whose prophetic voices have an authentic ring are where we are most likely to find the authenticity of the gospel.
The hon. Member for Corby (Mr. Powell) suggested earlier that most Churches were most full where Christianity was not considered to be relevant to politics or having a message about politics. I attended the remarkable and vast gatherings of the Spring Harvest evangelical organisation where many people feel very deeply about current moral and political issues.

Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman: Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the point was that the emptiest Churches were those where the doctrine of Christianity was not preached, in other words where secular doctrines were preached to the exclusion of Church doctrine?

Mr. Beith: That was not the point as I understand it. Perhaps the hon. Lady is thinking of the remarks made by the hon. Member for Halesowen and Stourbridge (Sir J. Stokes). I was referring to a point made earlier by the hon. Member for Corby which seemed to carry the import which I have attributed to it.
Petitions are pouring in at the moment from active Christian Churches all over the country about people in South Africa who have dissented from military service in the South African defence forces because of their disagreement with the system in that country. They are coming from active congregations who believe that there is a relationship between the gospel and political issues.

Mr. Heffer: The hon. Gentleman should be aware that I was invited to visit a parish church in Lancaster to give a sermon. That church was packed to the gunwales.

Mr. Beith: I am not at all surprised and quite delighted about that. Having co-authored a book with the hon. Gentleman on those issues, I would have expected a crowd to gather to hear him.

Dave Elaine Kellett-Bowman: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Beith: I do not think that this point requires a sequence of interventions.
The note of challenge is bound to be seen as a challenge to this Government. It would be a challenge to any Government, but there are particular challenges for this Government. The most powerful challenge is that the Government appear to have adopted the concept of "passing by on the other side" as an objective of public policy. They believe that that is desirable, but that concept threatens many areas of public policy.
The Government's attitude to apartheid in South Africa and the desirability of acting with other nations to bring pressure to bear on South Africa is that they should leave well alone and stand well back from it. The Government's attitude to many aspects of homelessness is one in which they say, "Well, we'll see what the private sector can do and leave it to them to solve the problem." That attitude is very obvious today in the battle over the funds for hostels which provide for people with special housing needs—for example, women with children who have had to leave home or who have been turned out


because of domestic violence and young people with nowhere else to go. Those hostels are unable to meet their commitments on the proposed level of Government funding.
There is a similar willingness to "pass by on the other side" in relation to poverty and the Health Service. I sometimes think that the Prime Minister would have said to the victim in the Good Samaritan story, "Why haven't you got private health insurance? You wouldn't have had to worry."

Mr. John Patten: That is cheap.

Mr. Beith: No. The Prime Minister has given her own interpretation of the Good Samaritan story. She said that the main point is that the Good Samaritan could only provide help because he had prospered, had the means to put the victim in a hotel and could provide for him to stay there for a few days.
There is another side to the story. The dominant aspect in the New Testament is that if we see someone suffering, we must do something about it.
The criticism we make of the Government is that, while we recognise the desirability of helpng people to look after themselves to the greatest possible extent, if there is deprivation, suffering, homelessness and ill-health, for the state to stand by and not take the action that it could is a form of passing by on the other side.
The Gospel imperatives ask the question:
Lord, when saw we thee hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee: Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
The imperative is very clear, and the state cannot stand back and say, "We do not intend to do very much, because we believe that the private sector will solve the problems for us—even though there is no proof of that."

Mr. David Martin: Between 1974 and 1979, we saw examples of the state attempting to take on certain responsibilities, and to solve problems that had been with us for some time. I sympathise with the hon. Gentleman's remarks about those problems, but a successful way of managing them could not be found in the years between 1974 and 1979. The Prime Minister herself said that for the state to operate, individuals within it must carry out their responsibilities in conjunction with the state. What is wrong with that?

Mr. Beith: As a general proposition, I do not dissent from it, but between 1974 and 1979, the Health Service was, in some respects, in a better state than it is today. If the current Health Service proposals are implemented in full, its deterioration will be much worse.
The hon. Gentleman was seeking some common ground with me, and I wish to establish that common ground. I believe that individuals should be given the greatest possible opportunity to look after their own affairs. I believe that in respect of individual rights, for example, individuals should be protected from an overbearing state. I regret the fact that Conservative Members do not join us in safeguarding individual rights through a Bill of Rights.
I believe also that the tax system should be reformed, so that those having the lowest incomes are given an opportunity to look after themselves, and do not find that they are bearing the heaviest relative burdens that the tax

system imposes, so that they too may exercise more responsibility and self-reliance. Getting the balance right, and ensuring that people can behave responsibly—and are given the opportunity to do so—without the state passing by on the other side, is difficult. The criticism that many in the Churches are making of the Government is that they have got the balance wrong: they do appear to be passing by on the other side.

Mr. Nicholas Bennett: The hon. Gentleman says that under the last Labour Government—which his party actively supported during that Government's last two years—the National Health Service was in better shape. That comes as a surprise, given that the Health Service was then funded by 40 per cent. less in real terms than it is today, with 60,000 fewer doctors and nurses, and with a 30 per cent. cut in its hospitals' capital growth— compared with a 30 per cent. increase in spending on the capital programme under the present Government. How does the hon. Gentleman explain that?

Mr. Beith: I suggest that the hon. Gentleman goes round the hospitals of this country and asks those who work in them whether they think that the Health Service is better now than it was a decade ago. He will find a degree of anxiety verging on despair.

Mr. Nicholas Baker: On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. You will be aware that a large number of right hon. and hon. Members wish to debate the second motion on the Order Paper. Without seeking in any way to tell you, Madam Deputy Speaker, how to do your job, I shall be grateful if you will ensure, in view of the important debate on town and country planning that many right hon. and hon. Members wish to reach, that discussion of the Health Service does not take up too much time.

Madam Deputy Speaker (Miss Betty Boothroyd): I take the hon. Gentleman's point, but the motion now before the House is all-embracing. If there are fewer interventions, the hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) could proceed more speedily.

Mr. Beith: I will take the hon. Gentleman's hint and not give way for a while. In the interests of lively debate I gave way extensively.
The question of passing by on the other side is not the only one on which many Christians wish to take issue with the Government. There is also the matter of general moral values and the belief that the state, while not legislating on moral values, can to a large extent uphold them. There is much anxiety among Christians about a get-rich-quick morality that seems to supplant older values that one thought had a place, even in the philosophies of Conservative Members. A whole series of incidents emphasises that fear.
Today's newspapers report yet another stage in the saga of the sale of cemeteries by Westminster city council. The idea that it is proper for a public body to sell off its cemeteries for 15p, see £1 million profit made out of them, and then try to silence the official who could reveal much of the truth of what went on and who has been critical of the councillors involved shows that a different kind of morality prevails than many Christians feel is appropriate.
On Sunday trading, we see the Government's apparent determination to bring about a state of affairs where Sunday will be like all other days, with those working in


the retail trade having no protection for their family life. That is seen by many Christians as an assault on basic Christian values and on a basic aspect of our society.
In saying that such matters pose a challenge to a Conservative Government, I am not saying or suggesting that Christianity poses no challenge to people who hold other political views. I would have been more impressed if Conservative Members had shown more awareness of that. I see a challenge to my own political beliefs. There is also in the Christian gospel a challenge to Socialist beliefs. If either of our parties were in government, we would expect the Churches to be critical of some of the things we were doing—perhaps because we were not doing enough of something or underestimating important values.
There is criticism also of Parliament as a whole. For an issue of such moral importance as abortion, affecting whether or not life can proceed, to be one that Parliament is unable to decide because its own procedures fail to allow a widely supported private Member's Bill to be decided upon is an indictment of this House. Many Christians find that intolerable and impossible to comprehend. If the House does not take action to ensure that it can legislate—it was only able to do in 1967 because the Government provided time—that will be an affront to many Christians.
The Churches promote moral values and spirituality, and will continue doing so. However, in doing so they are bound to come into conflict with the Government of the day. They are bound to come into conflict with the present Government and with future Governments. When I hear suggestions that the Churches are wrong to come into conflict with the Government, and are wrong to speak out when they do, I am very fearful. That is not the way we should speak to the Churches of this country.

Miss Emma Nicholson: One of my ancestors killed Thomas à Becket. Others left France in 1698, on the repeal of the edict of Nantes, to save themselves from the vengance of the French king against the huguenots. Therefore, in my blood I have always been conscious of 700 years or more of conflict between Church and state. Perhaps that is why I am wholly unable to support the motion of my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sir H. Miller)—although I welcome his courage and determination in presenting for debate a subject that can never be explored too often.
As a communicant member of the Church of England, I cannot see any good reason for continuing the long-established tie between Church and state. I rest my case on the Magna Carta which, right hon. and hon. Members will recall, states that the English Church shall be free. Is the Church honestly free, when No. 10 Downing street appoints its bishops? If No. 10 does not appoint the bishops, can somebody tell me who does? No. 10 is meant to do so.
Recently, as a member of the House of Commons prayer group, I was fortunate, with other hon. Members, to be part of the national prayer breakfast group in Washington. There were 134 Christian churches represented there, among the Christian-based prayer groups of 134 Parliaments. I dare swear that not one of them, other than the British Church, is subservient to its state.
Last summer, the matter was brought home strongly to me when the Copyright Bill, on which we all laboured so mightily, went to the House of Lords. It had come from there in a terribly tattered state, and was returned there by this House in a much better one. My interest is computer software, and I went to the House of Lords to check that nothing dreadful happened to any of our precious amendments to the Bill. I looked over from my stance as a Member of the House of Commons to see a pair of muslin sleeves and a billowing cloud of red silk leaning back on the Benches, gently snoring as if "Barchester Towers" were still in the writing.

Mr. Robert Key: It is.

Miss Nicholson: I hope not—I would be appalled.
I believe most strongly that the time is long past when the Church of England should have been disestablished from the state.
I also disagree with the motion because we live in a multi-faith society. The year 1871 was a splendid year, when one of my great-grandfathers crossed the Floor of the House from the dying Liberal party to the reviving, thriving Conservative party, to join another two of my great-grandfathers, who had so rightly tempted him over.
My fourth great-grandfather took the cloth and became a curate in London. I bought my house in London because it was at the end of the street where he had been curate. When I went to church and told the vicar, he looked down his nose and firmly said, "Which curate? In 1871 we had six." My goodness, how the Church of England has tumbled since then. I want a stronger Church of England, not a weaker one.
Today, we live in a multi-faith society. Many faiths with many glorious writings, preachings and teachings form that society. For that reason, the motion is too narrow. It talks about the Church's leading role in the promotion of moral values. What morals? Morals are only customs. Today, the young most certainly will not listen to talk from Parliament—a Parliament that includes the Church—on their sexual behaviour, and nor should they. That is a matter for the individual.
What matters are the laws that we pass, which should ensure, in my view as a practising Christian, that the state gives the best possible credence to the values that we place on each other. As many people say—and I believe it to be true—our society's values are derived from many wider sources than mere Christianity. I am tempted to ask, "Why on earth involve the Church in the promotion of moral values?"—if that is the aim.
The Church is riddled with faults. The Christian Church has long been known as the combative Church which created violence, war and assaults. We need only look at St. Paul's Gospel to see that, according to him, all men and women are not equal before God, as they are in Christianity. The Church has been notably untruthful. It has been involved in creative accounting of the most amusing sort. In the 15th century—not that I was there then, I hasten to say, but I have read my history books—the Christian Church in France sought and obtained deliverance from fish on Wednesdays and Fridays in Lent, on the ground that anything shot within 15 miles of the sea shore counted as fish.
We have to agree that the Church is made up of very ordinary people, and people are often wrong. They are sometimes wrong in simple ways—even in their translation


of the Bible. For example, Joseph's "coat of many colours" did not contain many colours but it had long sleeves, which at last makes sense of that chapter of the Bible. Joseph had been promoted over his brother: workmen had short sleeves, the overseers had long ones. It was a case of "jobs for the boys".
The Church should, and must, be involved for a much deeper and more valid reason, which is that it is the embodiment of Christianity. Therefore, to me as a Christian—I shall not go into why, because it would take too long—the twin leading roles of the Church are not those in the motion, but to teach us the worship and love of God, who is all around us in every possible way, and to love our neighbours as ourselves.
Those must be the reasons for involving the Church in our lives in any way, shape or form, be it in politics or any other aspect of our public or private lives. From those two New Testament commandments from Christ spring the practice and principles of public and private morality.
The concept of the public good surely comes from the notion of "Love thy neighbour". It makes us sensitive to our neighbours' needs and it gives us the determination of will to do everything that we can for the good of our neighbours.
It is sometimes difficult to believe that we in Parliament have any Christian principles at all. At my Sunday school I was taught certain concepts of behaviour that fell within the Christian pattern: for example, the lack of hatred of other people and the lack of screaming, noisiness and horribleness to each other. I have to say that I have been in Parliament for 20 months and such behaviour, almost more than anything else, has been the order of the day. Yet we pretend that we are following Christian principles. Is it really too late to reform Parliament and to make us be just a little more Christian towards each other? I do not think so—I think we could well achieve that.
I am glad that we do not have the Ecclesiastical Committee with us today. We can speak as perfectly ordinary Christians, with our weaknesses. We might have felt hampered if we were before an Ecclesiastical Committee with its firm role of putting forward goodness. I am delighted that it is away on synodical business. The only weakness of my proposal to disestablish the Church is that it will fall into the clutches of that dull body, the Synod. I would that more Back-Bench Members from both sides of the House belonged to the Synod, because that would make it a more interesting, cheerful and spicy place.
Christianity also gives people the strength to be bold. The hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) mentioned the Church in Poland. I was fortunate enough to meet the elected President of Poland in Washington. It is marvellous that such a post exists. The man is a strong Christian. He told me, for about half an hour, how his Christian principles gave him the strength to return to Poland to debate with Solidarity and the non-elected Government.
Christianity gave the head of the Methodist Church in Japan, whom I also met in Washington, the strength to write the most bold and challenging letters to Japan's Prime Minister complaining desperately that Shintoism appeared to be part of the Emperor Hirohito's funeral rites. Shintoism is the worship of the Emperor that was outlawed after the second world war. That brave man had

also written to the White House. The first visitor to the new order of President Bush at the White House was Japan's Prime Minister 10 days ago.
Christianity has given the nuns in southern Africa whom I know so well the strength to continue their missionary activities. Church of England missionary activities are long outdated, and as a Christian, I deeply regret that. If we believe in Christianity, we should certainly want to convert people to our faith. If we do not, why bother to pretend that we are Christians? It gives those nuns the strength to try to convert people from their sometimes miserable behaviour, in terms of what they believe and whom they worship. It also gives the nuns the strength to combat that worst of all evils, apartheid, and to do it with courtesy, dignity and Christian morality. Christianity gives us great strength to help other people.
Let me return to my theme of the disestablishment. Once before, the Church of England can, with far greater power and much louder voice, help to set the political agenda. In my view, the eradication of poverty has to be at the top of that agenda. I believe strongly that we have at last, through the exercise of, dare I say it, Conservative principles, been able to make this country much wealthier. Now, we can and must turn to the eradication of poverty, not just in the United Kingdom but in the developing countries as well.
The difference between the two sides of the House is not in the eradication of poverty but in how we achieve it. I still detect in the Opposition a delightful but outdated and irrelevant paternalistic concept of giving to others to try to help them in their poverty. But we cannot buy off poverty. If that were possible, it would have been bought off years ago. We have to be far cleverer than that. With our determination to help others and our Christian principles at the fundament of what we do, we must devise ways of helping people to conquer their own poverty, giving them the dignity of looking after their own affairs and helping them to reach that most splendid and proper position—the true dignity of being a human being.
Therefore, I have to oppose the motion, although I applaud the sentiments and concern of my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove. I particularly applaud his goodness and integrity as a human being, which are based on his fundamental Christian ideals. But for me, the primary task of Christianity must be the love of God, and the living out of Psalm 104:
Bless thou the Lord, O my soul. Praise ye the Lord.
To do that I believe that the Church of England should be cast adrift from the state so that it can once more help people in the United Kingdom come to God, worship God and help us all love our neighbours and ourselves, and in this place through the proper discharge of our political responsibilities.

Mr. Tony Benn: This is the first debate in 40 years that covers the relationship between Church and state. We have had various discussions about Church Measures and about individual questions, but the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sir H. Miller) has done us a service by opening up the possibility for a very wide-ranging debate, which in most countries would be taken for granted.
The idea that we should discuss religion only every 40 years—I have been a Member of Parliament for 39 years—is strange when we consider the enormous political


power of religion in other parts of the world. The Vatican has always been powerful. It sent an army here to deal with Pelagius, the first heretic, and to put down Pelagianism. The born-again Christians in America are supposed to have been behind President Reagan and the born-again Moslems in Iran now support the Ayatollah Khomeini. The fundamentalists are burning Salman Rushdie's book because they believe that the blasphemy laws should protect the reputation of Mohammed. The argument between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites is mostly unknown here and not understood in Britain although they each represent a very powerful political force. Although the conflict in Northern Ireland is not primarily about religion there is certainly a theological dimension.
Socialism is a faith too. The hon. Member for Bromsgrove said that he started as Christian Socialist. My definition of a faith is something for which people will die, while a doctrine is what they will kill for; there is all the difference in the world between a doctrine and a faith. People will kill other people because they will not accept their doctrines, but they will die for their faith. I have never heard that anyone has been prepared to die because they held a particular view about the size of the public sector borrowing requirement or what should be the basis on which economic policy was formed.
This debate involves high political argument at a rather more fundamental level. I was brought up to believe that the whole story of the Old Testament was that the kings exercised power and the prophets preached righteousness. That conflict has annoyed some speakers. We are discussing the relations between Church and state, between politics and faith and of each with each other. Although I make no complaint about it, the hon. Member for Bromsgrove made a very strong attack on the Church because Church leaders ventured to have a view on atomic weapons which could obliterate mankind if wrongly used; and on inner cities, where terrible suffering is experienced in this so-called rich society. The archbishop was criticised for preaching reconciliation in the service at the end of the Falklands war. Although the matter has hardly been touched upon, there has been savage anger that a woman should have been ordained as a bishop in the United States of America, and there has been criticism of the social message of Christianity.
The debate takes us back to the reason why the Church of England was established. I have introduced a Bill to disestablish the Church, and I hope that the hon. Member for Torridge and Devon, West (Miss Nicholson) will be a signatory to it when I reintroduce it this Session. I know that it has widespread support. Henry VIII nationalised the Church of England because he was not prepared to have a power outside his own control with command over the hearts and minds of his subjects. There had to be a priest in every pulpit telling the faithful that God wanted them to do what the king wanted them to do. The Church of England was established for exactly the same reason as the Conservative Government nationalised the BBC—it was not a Labour Government that did that. The Conservative Government wanted a pundit on every channel telling people that there was no alternative to what the Chancellor of the Exchequer wanted them to do.
I listen to the economic commentaries every night. At first I was puzzled. Dominic Harrod tells us every night

what has happened to the pound sterling to three decimal points against a basket of European currencies. I have never seen a basket of European currencies, but I shall take one next time I go on holiday. Dominic Harrod tells us that every night, and in the morning we see pensioners hurrying to the post office to sell their deutschmarks and buy their yen. It is witchcraft from those who believe that capitalism, Christianity and democracy are indivisible. I say that not as a criticism solely of the Government Front Bench because I see that political infection coming into the policy reviews of the Labour party, so I hope that no one will think that I am making a party political point.
The Dow Jones industrial average exercises greater influence than the Ten Commandments. It is a choice for Mammon against God. Christian Socialists might wish to make that point. We are told about the Bible. My favourite picture in St. Stephen's Hall, of which I have many copies at home, is of Wycliffe's Bible. The House would not allow the Bible to be made available to the public until the middle of the 16th century. When the New Testament was first translated, Tyndall's Bible was smuggled in in bales of hay. Only one copy remains in the Baptists' college in Bristol. One of my proudest possessions is a reproduction of it. It was a Marxist, Allende in Chile, who first made the Bible available to the people there; the bishops did not want the faithful to have a chance to go back to the text. That is why I have never been able to take episcopacy into my system, and I believe in the priesthood of all believers.
Ultimately, politics, debates and legislation always reflect the guiding principles upon which society wishes to rest. Policies may change with circumstances, and no one is more disposable than a politician. Democratic institutions are more fundamental, but ultimately everything will reflect the principles on which society bases itself. A society is either a community or a jungle. We are now in the process of telling people that they have no responsibility for one another. Society has been encouraged for a variety of reasons to abandon that sense of responsibility.
There was a little discussion about the Prime Minister complimenting the Good Samaritan on his wealth: if he had not been rich he would not have been able to help. I am awaiting her comment on the widow's mite for she had no wealth to give but gave all that she had. It cannot be morally right for any Member of Parliament, Churchman or citizen to see a world and society which puts the accumulation of wealth above the most pressing human need.
I was in New York before Christmas. It was the coldest 12 December on record. It is the richest city in the richest country in the world. Homeless people were living on the streets in cardboard boxes.

Mr. Heffer: It happens here.

Mr. Benn: Indeed it does. I am giving the New York example first because the police were arresting homeless people and putting them in warehouses. Some drug addicts attacked each other, so the poor resisted arrest. In the New York Times that day were identical pictures, but they were of homeless people in Armenia—a much poorer country—after an earthquake.
I do not know how society can accept homelessness or the plight of the poor and dispossessed. How can we justify expenditure of enormous sums of money on nuclear


weapons when 15 million babies die every year for lack of a vaccine to prevent diarrhoea'? What do we say to bishops who speak out against it? That must be the connection between moral values and political decisions.
There are many views of the Church. One is that its task is only to invite people to seek personal salvation. I can understand those who think that that is all it is about, but there is an element of escape in saying, "Whatever happens to anybody else, I will be saved." There is another view—it is probably even more popular—which is that, if only the rich are kind and the poor are patient, it will be all right when we are dead. I suppose that Socialists say to that type of Christian, "We want it before we are dead. We want it now." That must mean that some of the qualities attributed to the kingdom of heaven should be brought forward to life on earth. It is out of that view that liberation theology, which is immensely powerful in the world, has drawn its strength.
My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heffer) is a scholarly man, and I thought his speech excellent. He took us back to the peasant's revolt and the reverend John Ball who asked:
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
Where in the book of Genesis is there any justification for the class system'? We can carry the thread through to Don Camaro in Latin America who said:
If I give food to the poor, I am called a saint; if I ask why the poor have no food, I am called a Communist.
There is today the most powerful alliance between Marxists and Catholic priests. There are many people who believe that Karl Marx was the last Old Testament prophet.[Laughter.] The House may laugh, but there are many Christians who believe that. We cannot blame Marx for what happened in Stalin's Russia, any more than we can blame Jesus for what the Inquisition did.
People with profound ideas and faith may create institutions which abuse their power. My hon. Friend the Member for Walton drew attention to that fact. Churches are human organisations. They are bureaucracies. They are like the Labour party: Churches have bishops; we have regional organisers. They both look all the time for heresies. I am not sure that the Church militant would survive with the present national executive committee of the Labour party. I have a feeling that it would be out on its ear. Some of the speeches that I hear made in my party about dissenting Socialists are not so different from what the hon. Member for Bromsgrove said about dissenting bishops. It is always a struggle to allow people to speak their minds, based upon their faith.
One of the most painful and difficult things for the House to remember is that all our liberties were won by breaking the law—by breaking laws passed by Parliament. I refer to the laws which allowed Catholics to persecute independents, or those which allowed independents to persecute Catholics. Jews were kept out of the House. All our rights were won in the name of religious freedom, so the preservation of religious freedom is of great importance.
We now have many religions. We have Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Moslems, Hindus and humanists. If we are to live in peace in a very small world, I believe that we have to teach all religions in all schools so that people have an opportunity to understand what moves the families from which their fellow students come. It is terrifying to me to think of the possibility—I do not know

whether the hon. Member for Bromsgrove intended it—of Christianity being taught and other religions in some way lying below the line. In the world in which we live, whites and Christians are a minority. We have to learn about the religions of the world. The hon. Member for Torridge and Devon, West made that point.
Disestablishment is long overdue. Were I to come forward as a member of the hard Left and say, "Establishment has been so successful that we intend to nationalise the Catholic Church and Jews," people would say that I must be mad, and they would be right. What is wrong with establishment is that a Church which should be performing a prophetic function has its leaders appointed by the Prime Minister of the day. I know that it is dressed up in synodical conventions and committees and, as with proportional representation, she can say, "No. 1 or No. 2" on the ballot paper when it arrives at 10 Downing street through the ecclesiastical secretary. I attended the enthronement of the Bishop of Bristol—Bishop Tinsley—when I represented a Bristol constituency, and I heard them order the cathedral to elect him. The appointment is under the power of the state.
It is ludicrous that the House should decide on the liturgy, but we still have ultimate responsibility for it. It is ludicrous that we should pass Measures about the retirement of bishops. We shall have to pass a Measure to allow women to be ordained—they will be ordained—when the House is not necessarily made up of Christians or people of any religious conviction. Since I gave a lecture on disestablishment and introduced my Bill, I have had more correspondence on that subject than almost anything else that I have done because it touches on the central question of what the relationship should be between the kings and the prophets—those who make the laws and those who try to preach righteousness.
I do not suppose that there will be a Division on the motion—the hon. Member may not wish to press it to a vote—but I am grateful to him for allowing us to have this brief debate on an issue which is central to the future of society. I venture this last thought. When the history of the 20th and 21st centuries comes to be written, it will be of Christians and Marxists against capitalists and militarists, and the former will turn out to have upheld the long-term survival of humanity and the preservation of those values which are associated with the teachings in the New Testament.

Mr. Alistair Burt: I apologise to the House for my absence from the beginning of the debate—I notified Mr. Speaker. I was giving a Lent lecture at the chaplaincy of higher education in Manchester, so perhaps I have as good an excuse as I can have.
I support the motion and the established Church. One might expect a Conservative Member to begin a speech in a debate such as today's by indignantly protesting from the very beginning:
Church of England bishops are in danger of over-estimating their importance as spokesmen and decision-makers.
I do not intend to do that—the quotation was from John Habgood's book. "Church and Nation in a Secular World" which he wrote as a previous tenant of the mighty bishopric of Durham.
I use the quotation to illustrate that it is not just the doctrinaire Right who recognise the danger in churchmen


overstepping the mark and to introduce my few remarks in the spirit of moderation which that gentle barb, when seen in the context of the rest of John Habgood's book, implied.
It is no surprise that the Anglican Church has from time to time been at odds with the state to which it is so uniquely attached. Like two headstrong would-be bridegrooms anxiously wooing the bride, in the shape of the English people, Church and state clash and counter-clash over the centuries with ideas and opinions. That tension should be of no surprise to the Church for it reflects a tension within itself about how it might express the work of Christ in everday life. The Church and Christians are not an exclusive body shut away from the world—we are citizens of two kingdoms, with responsibility in each.
Within Anglicanism the strands of quietism and activism can claim the classic authority of scripture, tradition and reason, as well as example. John Whale, in a section of his work "The Future of Anglicanism", contrasts the life of Charles Kingsley, the radical east-end activist at work in the appalling conditions of his time, with that of Augustus Hare, who ministered in a different way amidst rural poverty,
his dominant concern being to urge the Christian life and the Christian hope"—
one the activist, the other the quietist, exemplifying the sort of crisis that individual Christians and the Church continually face.
To what extent should we focus on the individual gospel of redemption, Christ's great commandment to
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul and all thy mind",
and to what extent do we pursue socially, communally and politically the second great commandment to
love thy neighbour as thyself"?
I do not think there is any conflict between these two. Indeed, they were given together to us by Christ and must be taken so. There are many Christians throughout this country and throughout the world who bind the two together in their everyday lives.
But clashes there have been between Church and state, and I believe that these are healthy and inevitable if conducted properly and handled in the right spirit—that is, in His spirit. Where they are not, warning bells will sound on each side.
So far as the Church is concerned, it must be cautious not to lose its authority. In the secular world of politics the Church has a voice, but it is an amateur voice, however authoritative it believes itself to be. In recent years certain parts of the Church and certain of its spokesmen have been ensnared by the never-quite-forgotten trap of strongly favouring one form of secular solution to express certain biblical principles over another. The risk of the social gospel is that it can tend to over-estimate the importance of the collectivist approach to man's problems, relate social problems and difficulties to the economic organisation of society, and thus conclude that a different economic order is as necessary for effective action as the gospel. The worth of the individual and the transforming effect of the power of Jesus Christ in his or her life—with the consequential capacity to change the human environment around him or her—are neglected.
There is another danger, which is closely allied to the first, and it is to believe that politicians are so responsible

for everything that only they should be looked to for solutions, whatever the problem may be—whether international or domestic, whether it concerns freedom from hunger or freedom from lawless, drunken behaviour. This is a dangerous view, for over-optimism about the power of politics to solve social problems leads, as a result of the experience of repeated failure, to cynicism and apathy and the consequent loss of a mature public involvement in political debate.
If these are warnings for the Church, there are also warnings for the Government of the day about being too heavy-handed in dealing with criticism from the Church. Governments have no monopoly of wisdom. They cannot do everything, nor can they see every problem. The social conscience of the Anglican Church, developed in parallel with other Christian influences of the 18th and 19th centuries, finding its finest parliamentary flowers in Wilberforce and the Clapham sect of social reformers, can still rightly tug at the cloak of defensiveness or complacency with which any establishment may clothe itself. We cannot, therefore, look back and praise the work of Wesley, Kingsley, Wilberforce, Shaftesbury, Elizabeth Fry and others for seeking to put right the social wrongs of their time through public campaigns of political activism, and claim now that all such work is done and that those who take up such crosses in the present day are either politically motivated or misguided.
Instead of concentrating on the differences between us and the arguments inevitable in any healthy family relationship, we should be looking to what we can do together. We cannot be in any doubt about the size of the task that we face. There is much materially in society that we on these Tory Benches, and possibly people in the country at large, recognise has never been at a higher ebb, much for which this Government can rightly claim credit. But there is also a tide of human spiritual degradation that has never been so low—with homeless, hopeless, drug-ridden youngsters in too many cities, and women in fear from rape and assault, not daring to catch the eye of their fellow passengers, in too many trains. This is a situation that shames nation, Church and state alike.
Starting from this point, we might do three things. First, we might recognise that we shall differ in our respective solutions, both in this House and outside, and in this recognition of diversity let us realise that our Lord glories in the diversity of His creation. We were not made the same, so it is no wonder that we do not think the same. We can argue our case in the proper spirit and seek the best source of action, respecting each other's position, and not always seeking to denigrate or ridicule any contrary political argument.
Secondly, we can both surely pursue absolute values in human society—the common creed that must be the basis for a secure civilisation. Here there is some legitimate criticism of the Anglican Church for not seeming to stand for absolute values, for ever qualifying and making relative even such matters as the wrong to be seen in lying and stealing. There are values that are classless and timeless, held and broken by families in all circumstances and in every part of the realm. It is not right to accept different standards of moral behaviour because of environmental circumstances. Violence and theft are wrong wherever they exist—not to be tolerated in Toxteth or Broadwater Farm or in the lager-swilling suburbs of the home counties, and


the more strongly the Church and the state can stand together for absolute values, the better it will be for society as a whole.
The Ten Commandments are not relative—they are the Ten Commandments, not a voluntary code of practice or a set of guidelines upon which Moses was required to report back to plenary session in the wilderness, there mandated to accept Nos. 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 unconditionally; to negotiate on No. 8; to reject Nos. 7, 9 and 10 on the grounds that they were incompatible for a nomadic, economically deprived group; and definitely to reject No. 4—about keeping the Sabbath holy—because, with so much walking through the desert to be done, the Sabbath was the only day to get out with the family and drop down to the garden centre and the do-it-yourself tent. So, there are some absolute values to be held.
Thirdly, Church and state must find the issues of the day on which to join, for it is concerted action alone that can produce the best results. This is surely the great lesson of 19th century social legislation, which is such a pride to us now, that stopped such a number of evils in their tracks. Each can bring its own strengths to bear on modern-day problems. The state has all its formidable legislative powers built on the rock of democracy and the will of the people. The Church has the redeeming power of our Lord Jesus Christ flowing through it. Together, Church and state have achieved great things in the past. It is well to remember this when we occasionally debate the spats and fights that punctuate their great union.
I shall close, if I may, with a small passage from Job, which might be a fitting epitaph not just for politicians but for any of us, if we could possibly live up to it. Job is speaking of a previous time before his difficulties, and he says this:
When I went to the gate of the city and took my seat in the public square, 
the young men saw me and stepped aside and the old men rose to their feet; 
the chief men refrained from speaking and covered their mouths with their hands; 
 the voices of the nobles were hushed, and their tongues stuck to the roof of their mouths. 
Whoever heard me spoke well of me, and those who saw me commended me, 
because I rescued the poor who cried for help, and the fatherless who had none to assist him. 
The man who was dying blessed me; I made the widow's heart sing. 
I put on righteousness as my clothing; justice was my robe and my turban. 
I was eyes to the blind and feet to the lame. 
I was a father to the needy; I took up the case of the stranger. 
I broke the fangs of the wicked and snatched the victims from their teeth.
If any politician in this House could go to his grave with that as an epitaph, he would have done his job. I suggest that it is a moral and a lead, not only for us in this House in respect of the way in which we do our work, but for any individual in society, to try to live up to those standards also.

Mr. Robert Key: It is always a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North (Mr. Burt), whose wit and lightness of touch complements so well his deep faith and commitment. His is a very difficult speech to follow. I very much enjoyed, too, the speech of

the right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn) who, I was delighted to hear, wishes to privatise the BBC. I was just six when he entered the House. I was then a pupil at the cathedral school in the shadow of Salisbury cathedral. He spoke with the wisdom of years, which I acknowledge. I wish only that his brand of wisdom was as benevolent as his delivery.
My hon. Friend the Member for Torridge and Devon, West (Miss Nicholson) spoke about "Barchester Towers." I commented that "Barchester Towers" is alive and well and continues to be in Salisbury. I have a letter that Charles Dickens wrote to my great-grandfather, who had the temerity to ask the great man to write a biography of Trollope. It would have been rather fun if he had. but "Barchester Towers" is still there. I have an ambition—to write a sequel that would be called "Barchester Spires", because an ex-Prime Minister would be in the plot and it would get very exciting.
I differ fundamentally from previous speakers, in that I do not claim the Church of England as my own, though it claims me. A number of speakers missed the point, including the hon. Members for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heller) and for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith). The hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed was unintentionally offensive when he referred to passing by on the other side being a Government doctrine. I believe that we are witnessing a return to a sense of personal responsibility. There can be nothing more in tune with that parable than the Government's policy of active citizenship. It was the state that crucified Christ. We have seen models of state that failed year after year.
There is no monopoly of virtue over the Westminster city council's sale of three cemeteries—not, at least, for a Methodist. There was a very sad case in my constituency. A Methodist church was sold for executive housing development. All the tombstones were removed to make a nice garden. We should be careful before we criticise each other about such issues.
I must declare my interest. I am steeped in the Church of England and I have known for a long time that it is not the Tory party at prayer. That was always obvious when I looked around the congregation in Salisbury cathedral. From Monday to Saturday we would be canvassing on the doorsteps, but on Sunday all the political parties would kneel down together in the cathedral, which was a jolly good thing. There are occasions, however, when that goes a little too far. On one occasion I was singing the creed in the Eucharist when a constituent tapped me on the shoulder because he wanted to speak to me about a particular problem.
Criticism comes in all shapes and sizes. I have been accused by the Democrats of going to church during elections for electioneering purposes. That was a bit ripe, since I have been going to Salisbury cathedral since 1946, but never mind. I was told by a wise old canon soon after I had been elected not to take on Mother Church. That was a very wise thing to say to a young politician but it begs the question, what is meant by the Church? For me, the Church is certainly not just the clergy and it is most definitely not just the Synod. It is all the people of this country who may or may not aspire to church attendance.
I take issue with my hon. Friend the Member for Halesown and Stourbridge (Sir J. Stokes) only over his reference to the decline in the number of people going to church. It is true that there are fewer committed regular churchgoers. It is also undeniably true that far more


people are going to church for the great festivals than has happened for many years. That is the case in Salisbury and I believe it to be true elsewhere. I include in any definition of the Church all the other churches, besides the Church of England. We are not exclusively addressing the Church of England in this debate.
Synodical government is terribly unsatisfactory. There are limits to democracy, and religion does not lend itself very well to democracy. The hon. Member for Walton made that point when he referred to the book "The Church and the Bomb." My bishop was a major author of that work, in which the Church set out its position. We may disagree with it, but at least it is a clear view. Then democracy became involved in the form of the Synod, which overthrew the doctrine that had been propounded in that book. There are occasions when democracy is not the answer to all our problems.
I suspect that, as with every other walk of life, there are silly politicians and silly churchmen. There are churchmen who think that they are six feet above contradiction and there are politicians who think that they are above the electorate whom they are supposed to serve. No one is immune from criticism. That is one of the problems that we face. I do not claim a monopoly of virtue. I do not claim possession of the Church of England, and the Church of England should not claim that it alone knows the route to salvation by means of its particular social policies.
I believe also that ordination is indivisible, in the sense that once a person has a dog collar around his neck, although he may put on a collar and tie on Monday, he is still a parson and that means something. I shall return later to that point.
The clergy have a right to comment on politics. I have always argued that they have a duty to do so. I have no difficulty over that. When a new incumbent or minister arrives in the constituency, I always drop him a line, if I am made aware of the fact, and welcome him. I give him my home telephone number and ask him to get in touch with me if there are any issues that I should know about, or if he has any views on national political issues that he thinks I should know about. My father, who was a priest in the Church of England, was a rural dean in Plymouth during the war years. At the height of the blitz the local Member of Parliament toured the devastated areas and was extremely critical of my father. He wrote to the bishop and complained that my father should be a social worker, not a priest, because my father was, apparently, interfering in the housing problems of the day as a consequence of the blitz.
Parish priests are sometimes frustrated almost beyond patience not because they have too little to do but because they have too much to do. Expectations of what a parish priest can do are too great, particularly if their parishes consist of up to seven previous parishes, churches and village communities. However, I echo the opening words of my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sir H. Miller)—to whom we are grateful for allowing this subject to be debated—that there is great uncertainty in the Church about moral issues but enormous, overweening certainty about economic and political matters. That is a genuine problem for me. I do not mind being criticised for what I believe is the right way forward economically and

politically, but I find churchmen criticising a particular Government policy difficult to take—as though their views were uniquely in parallel with Christian belief. They do not like being criticised, however, if they say it from the pulpit. Both sides must consider that point very carefully.
My diocese is very lively and has a particularly lively diocesan director of social responsibility. He is no doubt an expert on theology but he has also become, he believes, an expert on rural deprivation, housing, broadcasting, Sunday trading and anything else that one cares to mention. He sees that as his role. It may be his role to be on every demo and to have his photo in the local paper every week showing him standing outside defence and other establishments, whether they be connected with cruise missiles, chemical warfare, housing, or anything else. It does not matter, so long as he is seen to be at the forefront of publicity.
Whether he is right or wrong about the matter in question and whether he understands the argument is irrelevant. I am convinced that for most of the time he does not know what he is talking about, but that does not stop me going to church and it certainly does not solve the problems. That is fine, but please may we have more dialogue between those who hold different points of view? I am not going to be chased out of the Church or remove my bottom from the pew just because a priest tells me that he disagrees with my politics. That is the robust attitude that we should take carefully.
The media have a role in all this. Why is it that my hon. Friends so often become upset by bishops? I am used to bishops and all sorts of clerics, so they tend not to worry me too much. But the Bishop of Durham has become more than the average bishop. He has become a party political focus. He may be acting in the grand tradition of the Prince of Bishops of Durham, although in the old days they were against the Scots, not on the same side—but no doubt we could debate that issue for a long time. I know from talking to Opposition Members that the Bishop of Durham performs an extremely important function for party political debate and focus in the north of England and gives a great deal of hope in areas where there is a good deal less prosperity than there is down here in the south. That is fine, but, as ever, it is perhaps the way he says it rather than the message that annoys people. One of the reasons why I was so delighted that my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove initiated this debate was that only 10 days ago, I had been surprised to see an article in my local paper, based near the south coast, headed:
Bishop of Durham lashes Maggie.
The article said:
The Bishop of Durham, speaking in Southampton last night, launched an attack on the Thatcher Government. Even by the controversial standards of the Right Rev. David Jenkins, it was sustained and savage criticism. He accused the government of 'intellectual and administrative thuggery' in a regime which was becoming more and more tyrannical…The Bishop also condemned the fact that in a country of the 'pre-dawn knock on the door and aggression towards the innocent' it took 100 policemen to remove deportee Viraj Mendis from a Manchester church sanctuary.
That is fine, if it is his view. I am not sure that it adds much to the sum total of human wisdom, but it illustrates why people become upset.
Let us consider the issue of sanctuary. We all know the historic basis of sanctuary. It went away a long time ago and was limited, at best, only to 40 days. Ironically, the


city fathers of Manchester refused to accept sanctuary when it was on offer. I was surprised to see in The Journal only last Thursday an article saying that students of
Salisbury and Wells Theological College held an act of witness in The Close in support of the principles of sanctuary.
A radical lot, clearly.
The witness was followed by a short vigil on the Guildhall steps to dedicate the Christian commitment to the cause of sanctuary, and was attended by members of churches and other sympathetic organisations in Salisbury.
I did not receive many letters on the issue when it was to the fore. I did, however, make a few comments in the House on the Monday when my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary made his announcement, and I was much heartened to see a splendid article by the Bishop of Kensington, John Hughes, in the Evening Standard of 20 January in which he said:
To portray the police in the present Manchester case as acting other than on behalf of a lawful society amounts to a gross distortion. We are left wondering whether the rights of the refugee or the desire to disrupt our society and discredit its laws are those uppermost in the protestors' minds…The rights of a Church to speak to society depend on the respect it can generate among ordinary folk whose instinct is that the qualities of justice and mutual responsibility for peace and order are an absolute 'must' if life is to be worth living.
When I had spoken on that Monday, I was in a state of some agitation and thought that I might be flooded by letters telling me how wrong I was. Of course, I was not.

Mr. Heffer: I am fascinated by what the hon. Gentleman has said. Will he cast his mind back and consider whether Herod might have said something like that about Jesus?

Mr. Key: I cannot speak for Herod, although he might have said that. One of the problems with the Bible is that one can pick out phrases that lead down opposite avenues. That is one of the mysteries of Christianity and we should, perhaps, explore that at a later date.
I was delighted when some of the most well-known commentators on Church affairs started saying that the Church had scored an own goal in the Mendis affair. Gerald Priestland in The Sunday Times said:
Certainly it is the duty of the churches to demand that human values be given more consideration than they are. But Mendis was a bad example, foolishly adopted, probably to the disadvantage of much humbler and less publicised cases. Church sanctuary was a very limited privilege in the past, and today it is a romantic myth. What is to be feared is that it will now be copied in mosques and temples, with far more inflammable consequences, reviving all the blasphemies of racism which need to fade out and be forgotten.
I could not say it better myself. There are also letters in support, including one from a canon in Dorset who said:
I am sure you are speaking for the majority of C/E members in what you said. I am distressed to find that all the church spokesmen on this matter have supported the idea of sanctuary and that the opinion of the rest of us has been excluded—except when somebody like you speaks for us!
An enormous body of opinion does not follow the much-publicised leadership point of view or the commentators who currently rate the headlines.
For a long time, I have felt a tremendous conflict. I am the first person to admit to being confused about where the Church is trying to go at present. I am confused in so many areas of life because my traditional education and upbringing have been not only challenged but positively blown apart. When I sit in Salisbury cathedral on Sunday—or in other churches—I look round at the tombs of crusaders and the memorial tablets to 19th century

missionaries. I cannot understand why the crusaders and the missionaries have been debunked by the current trendies of the Church leadership. I would have thought that we still have a responsibility for mission. With the crusaders, the politics of the day interfered with the message of the gospel, but the disrespectful way in which hundreds of years of English history are written off by the current interpretation from Church leaders leave me somewhat gasping. No doubt someone will hear my cry and seek to educate me.
As other hon. Members have said, it is astonishing that we are now supposed to think that the Church of England has no monopoly on the right way to live and that all of us must muck in together with other religions, which are all of equal value, and that we should not, therefore, bother about missionaries. That is an extraordinary concept. I have been associated with several missions—some high Tory and others Methodist.
That issue also touches on the question of religious education. When the Education Reform Bill was in Committee, we debated religious education long into the night and I remember having several altercations with the hon. Member for Durham, North-West (Ms. Armstrong). I believe that the Bishop of London got it right. I have to admit that there are many issues on which I disagree fundamentally with him, but he was right when he argued that to understand anybody's religion we had to be able to understand our own first, and that is the prime reason why I believe that schools should have a daily act of worship and that the Church should actively promote that.
I have had many arguments with professional religious education teachers. I taught religious education in a purely amateur way for many years when I was a schoolmaster and we covered many topics, not exclusively scriptural, as most other teachers would readily admit. The problem is that so many religious education teachers today do not see it as their duty to teach Christianity. They mention it in passing and give it equal status with other great faiths of the world, but they see it as their duty not to promote Christianity over other faiths. I find that bizarre and I would expect the Church of England in church schools to be saying something different. No one has yet convinced me that they are right to be denying our children that part of their heritage and that guide for their future.
Just occasionally, I should love to see a little more understanding of what the Government are trying to do. Occasionally, it might even be possible to hope that there might be a little faint praise from Church leaders about what we are achieving in this country, but we do not get such praise now, nor do we get a fair crack in the media. I mentioned that the media have a responsibility. Every hon. Member will know that when the media get it wrong there is precious little that we can do to put it right.
Quite recently, I was a little astonished by my own local paper, with whom I have few quarrels. I attended a meeting called by an elder of the United Reformed Church to discuss broadcasting. I was delighted that over 100 people were present, and we managed to get down to the issues in the broadcasting legislation. I said quite specifically that there is nothing in current law which says that we must watch Harry Secombe on Sundays, that such programmes must be shown, but that, of course, when franchises are being considered, that sort of programming is seen as desirable and competitive. I said that, as I saw it, nothing in the broadcasting legislation would compel


religious education or religious programming in future and asked, if we do not need it now, why should we need it in future?
That became a headline in my local paper. It said:
MP raps"—
I do not rap anything often—
lack of TV religion.
The article stated:
Mr. Robert Key said he regretted the absence"—religious programmes—"of and urged members of the multi-denominational council to pressure the Government for their inclusion.
I am quoted as saying:
'Likewise, there should be written into any future act that religious programmes must be broadcast'".
Well, I never said it, I would never say it, and I do not believe it. I have now put the record straight.
There are many issues on which we need to listen a little more carefully rather than shout at each other.

Mr. Heffer: I am fascinated by what the hon. Gentleman said about the article in his local paper. The hon. Gentleman previously read a quote about the Bishop of Durham. Was the quote about the Bishop of Durham as incorrect as the quote about the hon. Gentleman? Obviously, the press got the hon. Gentleman totally wrong. Could it have got the Bishop of Durham wrong, too?

Mr. Key: I should be delighted if his Lordship would write to me and tell me. I do not mind whether what the Bishop of Durham said was right or wrong. He has every right to make such statements. If he is wrong, no doubt he will write and tell me so. [Interruption.] We shall have to wait and see whether he writes to me to confirm or deny what he said. I certainly did not say what I am reported to have said.
Talking of tolerance, we must remind ourselves that different Christian denominations have quite different views on issues on which Christians do not always agree. Sunday trading is one such issue. I feel strongly about that issue. I was not able to support the Government on the last occasion when the issue came before the House. There were two reasons for that. One was that I was under great pressure from the Christian community in my constituency. Therefore, some have said that I am a wimp. I do not think that I was a wimp. It was a genuine reaction to a large body of people in my constituency who felt strongly about an issue.
The other reason was that a national chain of shops in my constituency was forcing 17 and 18-year-old employees to work on Sundays when they had not been contracted to do so. That chain of shops said, "If you do not like it, take us to court." That would have involved a civil action which the young men in question could not possibly contemplate. It was a disgraceful performance by that chain of shops, and it made up my mind. Until we have a sensible set of proposals on the table, I cannot support the issue.
I have been making my position absolutely clear. I do not hold that position on theological grounds, for the good reason that the theology is totally unclear. The rug was pulled from under my feet. Within a few weeks of that crucial vote, the dean and chapter of Salisbury cathedral admitted that, for years, they had been trading illegally on Sundays and did not know that they had to have a licence,

whereupon they promptly applied to the district council for permission to open a second shop to trade in the cathedral on Sundays. I felt a little alone on the issue.
I do not think that there is a paticularly Christian argument against Sunday trading. The minority of practising Christians in this country should recognise that we will do our case no good by imposing compulsion on non-Christians or non-practising Christians, rather than seeking to convince them of the merits of our case. One has only to look across the border into Scotland to see the total deregulation which has worked for years in a Calvinistic country. It seems to work rather well. My late father-in-law, who was a priest in the Episcopal Church of Scotland, wondered what all the fuss was about here.
I do not wish to trivialise the issue, but I must point out that the Sabbath used to be Saturday, anyway. I thought that we were told:
Six days shalt thou labour".
The Bible does not say that one must have one's day off on Sunday. Many people cannot have a day off on Sunday, and must choose another day of the week. I am prepared to listen to some sensible compromise that will put the law into repute, instead of disrepute, and will allow Christians to worship on Sundays without being forced to work. We shall see whether that will solve a problem which is so divisive among many Christians.

Mr. Nicholas Baker: My hon. Friend is obviously anxious to get into a discussion about planning and development policies. There is an opportunity to do just that a little later.

Mr. Key: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I will oblige him.
The diocesan director of social responsibility for Salisbury has issued a long letter to the county council on the development of a rural strategy for Wiltshire. It includes planning and development. In the second section of his letter, he talks about planning and development, and the effect on housing, education, employment, agriculture, the environment, transport, personal care, leisure facilities, and so on. It is yet another example of the difficulty that I face in being told that I should think about political issues from a religious point of view.
We cannot expect a monopoly of virtue in any denomination of the Christian Church. We must be more tolerant about Church and state relations. It may be true that the number of committed members of the Church of England who go to church every Sunday has declined, but I am reliably informed that more people go to church on Sundays than go to football matches on Saturdays. No doubt, when we have the new arrangements for identity cards, there will be even fewer people at football matches and even more in church.
However, at the same time, there has been a remarkable increase in attendance at other churches and denominations and a growth in the home church movement—those who happen to believe that churches are more of a hindrance than a help and that the same goes for the priesthood. A massive number of people are now more interested in Christianity than ever before.
I draw the attention of my doubting friends to what is going on in our parish churches. In the gentlest possible way, I ask some of my hon. Friends to examine their consciences. When did they last go to church? What did they hear when they got there? A great deal of ordinary, humdrum, essential, critical, crucial religion is going on in


our parish churches. It is not as though, every Sunday, the entire Church of England launches a tirade against the Government, and against Members of Parliament in particular.
I was deeply moved by the sermon that I heard in my village church yesterday. The congregation were told that one of the great virtues about being a Christian in this country is that someone can stand at the foot of the Cross and spit in Christ's face, and He would forgive him. Someone can stand on a soap box and yell at the Prime Minister, and not be thrown into prison. That was an important message to many people. Above all, it was a lesson of tolerance.
I am tolerant of the way in which the Church of England is acting in some respects at the moment. For instance, as one whose father was a bishop, I have no difficulity in accepting the prospect of women bishops in the Church of England. Sex is a complete irrelevance in such issues. I was happy when I heard about the enthronement of a female bishop in America this weekend. I was born a member of the Church of England and will live and die a member of the Church of England. Christianity is so much greater than any individual, any Church or any Church leader. Many of us support the Church of England in spite of its current leadership, not because of it.
Finally, it would be helpful if, in the spirit of not pretending that either party in the House has a monopoly of virtue, more people outside the House could know the words that we use to start our proceedings in this Chamber every day—that is, those of us who come. In the Prayer for Parliament, we pray:
We thine unworthy servants, here gathered together in thy Name, do most humbly beseech thee to send down thy Heavenly Wisdom from above, to direct and guide us in all our consultations: And grant that, we having thy fear always before our eyes, and laying aside all private interests, prejudices, and partial affections, the result of all our counsels may be to the glory of thy blessed Name, the maintenance of true Religion and Justice, the safety, honour, and happiness of the Queen, the publick wealth, peace and tranquillity of the Realm, and the uniting and knitting together of the hearts of all persons and estates within the same, in true Christian Love and Charity one towards another".
Amen to that.

Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman: I should like to make just one point at the conclusion of the debate, but it is one that I feel strongly. None of my hon. Friends has suggested—nor would they dream of suggesting—that bishops and clergy should not comment on the current state of the human condition in this and other countries. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North (Mr. Burt) said in his perfectly delightful speech, we are citizens of two kingdoms; we have duties to both." I agree with absolutely every word that he said.
However, what some of us find inexplicable and distressing is that all too often the clerics appear to pay infinitely more attention to that than they do to the basics of the Christian religion. It is the duty of a university professor to create controversy, and it is the duty and privilege of bishops to strengthen the faith of their flocks and to seek to bind their members together. I pray that they will do so

Ms. Hilary Armstrong: This has been an interesting and wide-ranging debate and I should like to thank the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sir H. Miller) for initiating it.
Hon. Members may wonder why on earth I am speaking from the Opposition Dispatch Box. That has struck me several times this afternoon. I am not an Anglican—nor, in the words of the hon. Member for Salisbury (Mr. Key), was I born into the Anglican Church. Like the hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) 1 am a nonconformist. I grew up in that tradition. Therefore, I come to the Dispatch Box with some trepidation.
Much of the confusion that has surrounded such debates for centuries is reflected in the Chamber today. I was brought up in a household with straightforward views on such issues. Our household and community expected that the Church, and local and national Government would be involved in the moral issues of the day, although there was never any question or discussion about how and why. It was simply accepted; it was part of our life. The personal, political and moral were seen and experienced as part of the whole. They were interlocking relationships that could not, and cannot, be divided.
It was made clear to me from an early age in many different ways that all of us have a responsibility to be involved in public service. Our lives were seen in terms of a pattern of public service. I never experienced any arguments about whether the Church should be involved in the social order: it was simply accepted.
William Temple has been quoted many times and I shall not avoid doing the same. He stated that the
church is bound to 'interfere', because it is by vocation the agent of God's purpose, outside the scope of which no human interest or activity can fall.
The debate should centre on that. I have often been told that we have not only a responsibility to be involved—not only does the Church have a responsibility to comment on or to be involved in the social order and the social world—but that if it does not take that responsibility it is missing the heart and core of God's purpose for it.
We have heard many of the different ways in which hon. Members regard what I see as not only a responsibility, but a duty. It will not surprise hon. Members that I disagree with some of the things said by Conservative Members. I agree with the basic premise of the hon. Member for Salisbury—he wavered from it a little, but we all do that sometimes—that there must be diversity and that none of us should be on the defensive about what the Church is saying.
I agree with the hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed, that the Church should "challenge" us. Indeed, one of its prime duties is to challenge us and to make us think about the way in which we perform our duty and meet our responsibilities in society.
In preparing for the debate, I inevitably thought about what the Government have been saying about the Church. I accept and welcome the fact that this is not a Government debate, that it has been initiated from the Back Benches. I am confused by the Government's attitude. The Church has been castigated for commenting on the effect of Government policies on the citizens of this country. I do not understand that, because I believe that it


is the Church's duty to comment on that. None the less, members of the Government have been angry that the Church has commented.
The Bishop of Durham has come in for more castigation than most. Perhaps another reason why I am speaking from the Opposition Dispatch Box is that I am from the bishopric—I come from Durham. I know and have often heard the current and previous Bishop of Durham. In our county, the established Church works closely with other Churches. Indeed, the previous Member for Durham, North-West is currently running the Church of England in my village although he is a Methodist. There are strong and close links between Methodism and the Anglican Church in our tradition.
I advise hon. Members to listen, at least sometimes, to what the Bishop of Durham says. I have never heard him speak without giving a message of great faith and challenge in the deepest Christian sense. On occasions, he has incurred the wrath of the Labour movement in Durham because he does not speak for one political party only. Indeed, he makes it clear that he is never speaking for a political party. He always speaks as a man of the Church and challenges all of us who are involved mainly in the political order.
Government action is inevitably affecting the social and moral order of the day, and the Church inevitably must comment on that. I do not always agree with the Church, nor would I expect the Government always to agree. When we in the Labour party are in government, the Church will criticise some of our actions. I hope that I will have the integrity to listen to and ponder on its comments.
I have had a look at what the Government have had to say. In particular, I have scoured the speeches of the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Education and Science, who is the latest member of the Government to comment on moral issues and the role of the Church and the state. I have difficulty with one argument which runs through both their speeches. They say that, these days, the main imperative should be individual responsibility. In his speech to Synod, the Secretary of State outlined both the Catholic tradition of community and what he calls the Protestant tradition of defending the individual. It may be useful if I quote from William Temple on this, because he highlights what I find difficult.
For me an individual is never separate from those around him or her. What makes me what I am is not simply me, but my relationships with those around me, my responsibilities and duties to them and the way in which they mould and challenge me. William Temple says:
Respect for the sacredness of personality"—
he speaks of personality rather than individuals—
in all citizens will lead us to demand that no child shall be condemned to grow to maturity with faculties stunted by malnutrition or lack of opportunities for full development.
No individual is separate from the way in which those of us responsible for directing the social order do so.
Much of the Government's policy jars with what is at the centre of my Christianity and morality. I have a responsibility to those around me, whatever my needs may be. Yet time and again the Government say that it is the duty of individuals first to look to themselves, to prosper and to develop an entrepreneurial spirit or whatever. I am

not saying that that of itself is immoral but, as William Temple puts it, there is a snare within it, and it is easy to fall into the snare and be trapped.
If we look first to ourselves, the imperative of public service and caring for the needs of others can be extremely difficult to meet. The Government need to listen now and again to some of us who say that the individual cannot be separated from the society in which he or she is living. Individual values cannot be separated from collective community values. The one interacts with the other. To put one aside, as the Secretary of State almost did when he emphasised the importance of the individual, jars with the core of our corporate and Christian tradition.
I find similar arguments in the Prime Minister's speech to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. I have pondered on these arguments and it seems that the question of individual responsibility is the basis of disagreement between hon. Members. It is also at the core of the bridling of some Tory Members at the comments of the Church, whether of the Bishop of Durham or the President of the Methodist Conference. The basic disagreement is about the nature of people and God, and the relationship between people and their God.
I have several other pages, but I know that others wish to speak. In our family everyone was involved in both politics and chapel. One never took on individual responsibility. We did not seem to suffer from that, as we were involved in everything that was going on. I remember when my father was out working with a congregation for a new church on a new estate. Some of the press turned up—we have already spoken about how the media always have a go at people in the public eye—and said to my father, "You are never at home. What about your family? You are always out here looking to the needs of everyone else."
Although I was only eight, I was there because we were taken along and became part of everything. Dad said—in a sense this has been how I have understood the interlocking relationship between the Church, the state and the moral order—"My children grow up knowing that we are all involved in public service. That does not mean that they are not important, but that they are important enough to be involved with me in the work of the Church in the wider world." William Temple said:
The aim of a Christian social order is the fullest development of individual personality in the widest and deepest possible fellowship.
That sums up what I am trying to say tonight about these relationships.
Christianity, if it is anything, is not a series of speeches or good words, but a way of life. It is about the way we conduct ourselves. That applies not only to individuals, but to the Government. If the Government expect us to take seriously their claim to have the moral and social order of the country at heart, they cannot separate their words from their actions. They cannot preach to Synod, the General Assembly or the House about the moral imperative and at the same time carry out actions which mean that a shameful number of people are homeless.
Last week, I spoke to some young people who have just come out of care and who are not entitled to any state benefit. I do not believe that that is a matter for which they can take individual responsibility, or that we should expect them to do so. Any Government must accept that there will be challenges when their actions result in such


consequences. No one should say, "You do not have a right to speak out." Those young people have the right to expect the House to perform its duty on their behalf.
I hope that on similar issues we shall have not just preaching about the actions and responsibilities of individuals, but acceptance of the responsibility that we all have as Christians and as members of society not to forget, for political expediency, the consequences of our actions. At the end of the day, those consequences will take us forward as Christians and as members of a society that purports to be Christian.

The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. John Patten): The hon. Member for Durham, North-West (Ms. Armstrong) said that she was not sure why she was here. I am rather glad that she was here, because I enjoyed listening to her speech. I entirely agree that personal, moral, political and religious matters are interlocked. That is something that she learned at her father's knee, just as I learned at her father's knee how to conduct myself at the Dispatch Box. I held him in great affection because he never once ruled me out of order. Just as he once kept the Chamber in order, I am glad to hear that he is now keeping the Anglican Church in business in the hon. Lady's village, despite the fact that he is a Methodist.
I cannot help but reflect on how much my right hon. and noble Friend Lord St. John of Fawsley would have enjoyed replying to the debate. I cannot aspire to his standards of dress. I am sure that purple shirts would have had a good airing this afternoon.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sir H. Miller) for introducing the motion and congratulate him warmly on the way in which he introduced it. I am sure that my view will be shared by hon. Members on both sides of the House. It has been a remarkable debate. It has been very moderate, with one or two exceptions—largely from among the Social and Liberal Democrats. We saw a new version of the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heffer), who made a moving speech. It was a non-ranting speech and very serious, and the whole House listened to it carefully. The only point from which I dissented was that he appeared to say that the Church of England is the Tory party at prayer. A close observation of the Anglican Church would show that to be untrue, just as it was untrue in the 19th century.
We heard a highly engaging and thought-provoking speech from the right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn), who introduced the novel suggestion—for me—that Karl Marx was the last great Old Testament prophet. I shall reflect on that and perhaps give him my views in writing from a personal rather than a ministerial view. I shall come to his important point about disestablishment later in my speech.
During the decade that I have known the hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith), I have held him in great respect. He is one of the few members of the Social and Liberal Democrats who is a national level politician. I was all the more surprised to hear his insulting—I presume that they were designed to be insulting—remarks about my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister. If he wishes me to give way, I shall do so only so that he can apologise to my right hon. Friend. The hon. Gentleman had the extraordinary idea that the Government were erecting passing by on the other side into a form of public

policy. He got into a terrible muddle. When citing housing and homelessness, he criticised the private sector, and by implication the housing association movement, for wishing to involve itself in housing the homeless. He completely forswore criticism of the councils that keep empty so many homes in the public sector.
The hon. Gentleman was deeply confused and, for once in his life, seemed to ignore the role and the contribution of the individual citizen and his active endeavour. When that very good king, Good King Wenceslas, heard rumours of starvation in the hills, he did not set up a royal commission to consider hunger in the Bohemian mountains and to report on other matters. He went out with food and kindling—an early meals-on-feet movement. It was extraordinary to hear the hon. Gentleman deplore, by implication, that sort of conduct.
We heard a most remarkable speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen and Stourbridge (Sir J. Stokes). It has often been observed in this place that he speaks for England, and he did so this afternoon. The points of greatest relevance, and the most telling to me, were those that he made about schools, Christianity and moral values. That is something that links all Conservative Members.
My hon. Friend the Member for Torridge and Devon, West (Miss Nicholson) gave us an account of her genealogy and claimed to be an accessory after the event, by descent, of the killing of Thomas a Becket. That was an interesting chain of events. Like the right hon. Member for Chesterfield, she said that she wanted disestablishment of the Church of England. There was some cross-party agreement in that regard. I need not go into the arguments for and against disestablishment, which would be a major constitutional upheaval, but I can say that the Government would not contemplate such a step unless they were convinced that the established Church wished it.
Perhaps I may take the theme for the rest of my brief remarks from my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove. The thrust of his speech was that the Church is trying to usurp the proper historial role of the state and that the clergy have come down from the pulpit to the hustings. The counterpoint of his thesis was that the Government had formed an unbecoming attachment to preaching sermons. That has been mentioned by my right hon. Friends the Home Secretary and the Secretary of State for Education and Science. The gist of my hon. Friend's message was that we the Government, as private individuals, and he as a private Member of the House should not be disqualified from commenting on Church and moral matters affecting all faiths and that, equally, churchmen have every right to comment on political and social problems.
I entirely agree with my hon. Friend, but I believe that each should be judged on the seriousness and weight of his arguments. That point was made by my hon. Friends the Members for Bury, North (Mr. Burt) and for Salisbury (Mr. Key) and—in a remarkable, and remarkably short, intervention—by my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster (Dame E. Kellett-Bowman).

Mr. Heffer: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that I once participated in a "You the Jury" debate with his right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) in which the right hon. Gentleman was overwhelmingly defeated? It was attended by clergy and lay people and the


overwhelming majority were in favour of disestablishment. I believe that many more people in the Church are prepared to agree with disestablishment than the hon. Gentleman pretends.

Mr. Patten: The hon. Gentleman has made his point. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Local Government and Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) is well able to put his own arguments here and in other places, as I have read in the public prints of Synod.
As the motion of my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove implies, there is a general assumption that it is the job of Churches to provide a moral lead and of politicians to provide a lead in secular matters. However, it is not always a distinction that is clear-cut, and clearly there is a considerable overlap.
The inner cities, for example, which have long concerned the hon. Member for Walton, are an area where churchmen have shown considerable interest and which have given rise to controversy. The inner cities have also been the scene of a considerable amount of constructive work by churchmen and religious leaders of all denominations. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of Liverpool or the Chief Rabbi speaks on these issues, we listen carefully.
The Church of England urban fund, launched last April, has already raised more than £6 million and given grants to more than 100 inner-city projects, which is a good thing. In 1986–87, there were about 100 projects funded by the Government's urban programme which were Church-based. We have a substantial number of Church projects and also a substantial number of Church-run but Government-funded projects in the inner cities, which show what good work can and will be done.

Mr. John Marshall: My hon. Friend has referred to the Church of England inner-city urban fund. I hope that he will take the opportunity to praise, as I am sure he would wish to do, the many volunteers who, using individual responsibility, have made that scheme such a success and have certainly drawn the attention of people in my part of the world to problems which perhaps day to day they would not know about.

Mr. Patten: I pay considerable tribute to those people of all faiths and denominations who have drawn attention to local difficulties in the south of England and to the needs of the inner cities.
Some of our Government inner-city task forces are forming constructive links with some of the black-based Churches. Here I find myself in agreement with the points made about the Evangelical movement by the hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith). We have some links with Evangelical Enterprise, which is an excellent body, and the West Indian Evangelical Alliance project, which is important in promoting individual enterprise and Christian development in the inner cities. Churches, therefore, have a role alongside Government.
I do not believe—I have not heard anyone say so in this Chamber—that Governments should be rigidly excluded from moral issues. Through the Government's promotion of the active citizen movement, through their support for the voluntary sector and through their involvement in and help for the charitable world—for example, the establishment of payroll giving—the Government have

shown a considerable moral lead, and one which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (Mr. Key) said, has not been recognised. It is a shame that, from time to time, that has not been recognised.
I consider that there are two historic functions which have always been there for the Churches to fulfil. The first is to propagate the essentials of faith, to assert and reassert the timeless message that there is an unchanging distinction between right and wrong—something that it is critically important for them to do—and that, knowing this, everyone has the free opportunity to choose the right. There is, therefore, an unchanging duty to respect one's fellow women and one's fellow men, to know that one cannot have everything that one wants instantly, to know that one must take personal responsibility for one's actions and, above all, to help those who are less fortunate and are weaker than oneself.
The second function can be traced back to the very origins of Christianity among the poor and oppressed, which is to look after the unfortunate, the downtrodden and the under-privileged. However, thirdly, I believe that there is an under-worked vein for the Church, of whatever faith. In historical times, the powerful and the wealthy, including many churchmen, were a tiny fraction of the country, but their duty was often—sometimes uniquely—to preach that those who were less fortunate than others should be looked after. However, in the modern world, where a large section of society is far more prosperous, there is a further missing element.
I do not believe that at the moment we have a theology coming from any of the Churches—from the Jewish faith, or the Moslems or anywhere else—which is appropriate for the climate of success that we have in Britain in the late 1980s. I do not believe that the Church has yet used a rhetoric appropriate when talking to a nation which is increasingly comfortable, but which should not be complacent. I do not believe that there is a theology, a rhetoric, to use, or a message for a successful nation. That is the third and missing element in much of the debate about the relations between the Church and the State.
The Churches remain welcome to preach generosity and compassion to those who from time to time hold power. However, I believe that spiritual guidance should in the end remain of far greater importance to any Church leader of whatever faith than any question of how to divide the national cake. In the absence of some sort of priestly theocracy running this country, such decisions remain a matter for the elected Government and Parliament to decide, and in the end for no one else.

Mr. Andrew Rowe: The early Church was notable for the happiness and joy with which its adherents were filled. That happiness and individual joy spilled out into making the Christian church an attractive centre for other people who were lost, anxious or frightened. I believe that there are many Christian communities—many of them within the Church of England—about whom that can be said. It is also sadly the case that they are in relatively small supply and that what we desperately need is a reawakening of that happiness, joy and excitement which is now rare to find. One of the charges which it is perfectly proper to lay on the shoulders of bishops is that they should be bending much of their energy and effort to enable that sort of development to reappear within the


Church. If that happened, I believe that one would find that many of the areas of controversy between the Church and the State would melt away.
I am sceptical and edgy about the proposition that, because a number of my Christian friends feel strongly that their belief requires them to behave in a particular way, that should, therefore, become the way in which the State requires the rest of the people to behave. That goes right through a whole range of the controversies which at the moment appear to be heating up the relations between the Church and the state.
I believe that each one of us has within his or her power the capacity enormously to improve the relations between the Church and the state. I listened with enormous interest, as always, to the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen and Stourbridge (Sir J. Stokes.) I detected within it a tendency—perhaps I detected it easily—that we share. I would be happy to see my bishop eating locusts and wild honey provided that he left me free to continue eating in the best restaurants that I could afford.
We all of us have the opportunity to improve relations, but many of us do not encourage within our own association a closer relationship between the local clergy and ourselves. Those who are working for most of their time with the afflicted in one form or another naturally become obseessed by that perspective. Those of us who have, perhaps, a wider range of contacts leave those workers too much to their own devices and then become unreasonably aggrieved when, out of their experience, they say things which strike us as either intolerant or intolerably naive. Mutual association would do us all a great deal of good.
I regret the increasingly rancid tone which some on both sides—if we can call them sides within the Church and within Parliament—are liable to adopt when discussing each other's behaviour. It is far better that we should build on the enormous good will and great strengths that exist. As many have said during the debate, we should not be so sensitive to criticism. If the Church wishes to speak out on political issues, those who do so on its behalf must be prepared— I think that most of them accept this—to be confronted in a political way. For some of them, however, that is a bruising experience.
When the Church does that, we who have developed skins of considerable thickness in this place should not be so sensitive. It is a curious perversity. We give the bishops—most of them are highly intelligent people—considerable authority within both Church and state, and it is curious that we should become so resentful if some of them, entirely properly or sometimes intemperately or stupidly, say things of which we do not approve. I could say much more but I am aware that there are others who wish to contribute to the debate.

Mr. Gerald Howarth: I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sir H. Miller) on introducing the motion. I am sure that our discussion this afternoon has shown the timeliness of the debate as well as presenting the House of Commons in a much truer light than those who report our proceedings sometimes convey. We have had an interesting and civilised exchange of views across the Floor

of the House. There are fundamental differences between hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber, but these have been expressed and thrashed out in a civilised way.
I suppose that we as politicians are on dangerous ground when we venture to comment on matters of morality. It is almost as dangerous as when the clergy enter into the political fray, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Kent (Mr. Rowe) has said. It is a commentary on the state of the Church of England in particular that my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove has tabled the motion and that there has been so much debate on the role of the Church and on the way in which it is performing that role.
The Church of England must give a much clearer lead than that which it is now presenting to us. Never was there a greater need for abiding Christian values to be clearly and unequivocally proclaimed. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North (Mr Burt) rightly said, there must be absolute guidance without equivocation. That is what our young people especially need. They do not need to be taught that life is a vast grey area. They must he taught in terms of black and white. They will discover as adults that life is not black and white and is instead a large grey area, but without a basic grounding, what hope have they of succeeding in this world?
I am concerned especially about the pressures on young people. As the father of three children, I have been placed in the dilemma in which many other parents have found themselves. Our children watch television programmes such as "Dallas". That programme and others portray a way of life that is entirely alien to that which the Church and most parents are trying to teach their children. How can we proclaim fidelity in marriage when night after night during episodes of "Dallas" we see people leaping in and out of bed with one another?

Mr. Nicholas Baker: The answer is to turn off the television set.

Mr. Howarth: As my hon. Friend says, the answer is to turn it off. Unfortunately, the programme is shown before the watershed hour. We cannot sit constantly by the on-off switch checking what is being shown on the screen.
What are we getting from the Churches? I believe that there is a preoccupation with the transient and a flirtation with party politics instead of a concentration on the abiding issues. The Church has plenty to say about South Africa. Until last week it had much to say about black sections. The Race Relations Act 1976 was supported by the churches when it first came into operation, but then they found that it conflicted with their aspirations for black sections. They now wish to wriggle out of the law of the land to suit their own purposes. Fortunately. the General Synod thought better of that last week. My hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (Mr. Key) mentioned the case of Viraj Mendis.

Miss Emma Nicholson: Will my hon. Friend give way?

Mr. Howarth: I shall not give way to my hon. Friend. She has had her say and I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove wishes to respond to the debate.
I believe that the Church is taking away our landmarks in what it is doing to our liturgy. This is not a semantic issue. In my view, the Lord's Prayer has been vandalised. That is an example of the false preoccupations of the


Church. The issue of women priests is likely to divide the Church. Therefore, it is something on which the Church must embark only with the very greatest care.
This is a Christian country. A recent opinion poll revealed, following a survey, that 85 per cent. of the population regarded itself as Christian. The coin of the realm carries the letters FD—fidei defensor, defender of the faith. It is right that other religions should be referred to, but if we are to understand our country and our history we must understand our own religion.
Some Opposition Members have suggested that somehow the Government's policies are at odds with Christian morality.

Ms. Armstrong: Hear, hear.

Mr. Howarth: I contend that irrefutably the arguments lie with us. It is we who are releasing the energy and endeavour of our people. We are allowing the people to make decisions for themselves instead of leaving decision-taking to politicians. I ask the hon. Member for Durham, North-West (Ms. Armstrong) where morality is to be found in the closed shop, which terrorises those working people who do not wish to join a trade union. Where is the morality in inflation, which has destroyed the savings of pensioners? Where is the morality in punitive taxation? I contend that there is no morality in Socialism.

Sir Hal Miller: I am sure that the House regrets that it was not able to hear more from my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock and Burntwood (Mr. Howarth)

because of the pressure of time. He presented an extremely robust defence of the moral base of a great many of our Government's policies.
As I said when I introduced the motion to the House, I appreciate that I am in danger of being misunderstood. Indeed, I was advised by many friends that I would be. Perhaps the misunderstanding was deliberate on the part of the hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith), who seems to have been sitting rather too closely to the right hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Ashdown). He has acquired some rather grubby characteristics as a result. I specifically did not say that priests and bishops should not speak out. I said that they should not expect to be accorded the same authority when they speak on economic or political matters as when they speak on ecclesiastical matters. I said that they could not expect to speak with the same authority from the pulpit or the throne on political matters as on religious matters
We had a wonderful trip down memory lane with the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Heffer) and with the right hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr. Benn). The right hon. Gentleman referred to liberation theology. Unfortunately time does not permit me to respond. However, hon. Members can read the second Vatican instruction on liberation which I commend as a critique of that theology.
We come to the end of this debate with the issues still unresolved about the disestablishment of the Anglican Church which has had some cross-party support. I ask those who where in favour of that to reflect most seriously on the implications as several of my colleagues have remarked. That could pave the way for much greater and more serious constitutional implications.

It being Seven o'clock, the Proceedings on the Motion lapsed, pursuant to Standing Order No. 13(8) (Arrangement of public business).

Official Secrets Bill (Allocation of time)

7 pm

The Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr. John Wakeham): I beg to move,
That the following provisions shall apply to the remaining proceedings on the Bill:

Committee, Report and Third Reading

1.—(1) The remaining proceedings in Committee on the Bill shall be completed in two allotted days and shall be brought to a conclusion at midnight on the second of those days.

(2) The proceedings on consideration and Third Reading of the Bill shall be completed in one allotted day, and shall be brought to a conclusion at Ten o'clock on that day; and for the purposes of Standing Order No. 80 (Business Committee) this Order shall be taken to allot to the proceedings on consideration such part of that day as the Resolution of the Business Committee may determine.

Report of Business Committee

2.—(1) The Business Committee shall report to the House its Resolutions—

(a) as to the proceedings in Committee on the Bill not later than 14th February 1989; and
(b) as to the proceedings on consideration of the Bill and as to the allocation of time between those proceedings and proceedings on Third Reading not later than the third day on which the House sits after the day on which the proceedings in Committee on the Bill are concluded.

(2) The Resolutions in any Report made under Standing Order No. 80 (Business Committee) may be varied by a further Report so made, whether or not within the time specified in sub-paragraph (1) above and whether or not the Resolutions have been agreed to by the House.

Proceedings on going into Committee

3. When the Order of the Day is read for the House to resolve itself into a Committee on the Bill, Mr. Speaker shall leave the Chair without putting any Question, whether or not notice of an Instruction has been given.

Conclusion of proceedings in Committee

4. On the conclusion of the proceedings in Committee on the Bill the Chairman shall report the Bill to the House without putting any Question.

Order of proceedings

5. No Motion shall be made to alter the order in which proceedings in Committee or on consideration of the Bill are taken but the Resolutions of the Business Committee may include alterations in that order.

Dilatory Motions

6. No dilatory Motion with respect to, or in the course of proceedings on the Bill shall be made on an allotted day except by a member of the Government, and the Question on any such Motion shall be put forthwith.

Extra time on allotted days

7.—(1) On the first and second allotted days paragraph (1) of Standing Order No. 14 (Exempted business) shall apply to the proceedings on the Bill for two hours after Ten o'clock.

(2) Any period during which proceedings on the Bill may be proceeded with after Ten o'clock on either of those days under paragraph (7) of Standing Order No. 20 (Adjournment on specific and important matter that should have urgent consideraton) shall be in addition to the said period of two hours.

(3) If an allotted day is one to which a Motion for the adjournment of the House under Standing Order No. 20 stands over from an earlier day, paragraph (1) of Standing Order No. 14 (Exempted business) shall apply to the proceedings on the Bill for a period of time equal to the duration of the proceedings on that Motion; and on the first or second allotted day that period shall be added to the said period of two hours.

Private business

8. Any private business which has been set down for consideration at Seven o'clock on an allotted day shall, instead of being considered as provided by Standing Orders, be considered at the conclusion of the proceedings on the Bill on that day, and paragraph (1) of Standing Order No. 14

(Exempted business) shall apply to the private business for a period of three hours from the conclusion of the proceedings on the Bill or, if those proceedings are concluded before Ten o'clock, for a period equal to the time elapsing between Seven o'clock and the conclusion of those proceedings.

Conclusion of proceedings

9.—(1) For the purpose of bringing to a conclusion any proceedings which are to be brought to a conclusion at a time appointed by this Order or a Resolution of the Business Committee and which have not previously been brought to a conclusion, the Chairman or Mr. Speaker shall forthwith put the following Questions (but no others)—

(a) any Question already proposed from the Chair;
(b) any Question necessary to bring to a decision a Question so proposed (including, in the case of a new Clause or new Schedule which has been read a second time, the Question that the Clause or Schedule be added to the Bill);
(c) the Question on any amendment or Motion standing on the Order Paper in the name of any Member, if that amendment is moved or Motion is made by a member of the Government;
(d) any other Question necessary for the disposal of the business to be concluded;

and on a Motion so made for a new Clause or a new Schedule, the Chairman or Mr. Speaker shall put only the Question that the Clause or Schedule be added to the Bill.

(2) Proceedings under sub-paragraph (1) above shall not be interrupted under any Standing Order relating to the sittings of the House.

(3) If an allotted day is one on which a Motion for the adjournment of the House under Standing Order No. 20 (Adjournment on specific and important matter that should have urgent consideration) would, apart from this Order, stand over to Seven o'clock—

(a) that Motion shall stand over until the conclusion of any proceedings on the Bill which, under this Order or a Resolution of the Business Committee, are to be brought to a conclusion at or before that time; and
(b) the bringing to a conclusion of any proceedings on the Bill which, under this Order or a Resolution of the Business Committee, are to be brought to a conclusion after that time shall be postponed for a period equal to the duration of the proceedings on that Motion.

(4) If an allotted day is one to which a Motion for the adjournment of the House under Standing Order No. 20 stands over from an earlier day, the bringing to a conclusion of any proceedings on the Bill which under this Order or a Resolution of the Business Committee are to be brought to a conclusion on that day shall be postponed for a period equal to the duration of the proceedings on that Motion.

Supplemental orders

10.—(1) The proceedings on any Motion made in the House by a member of the Government for varying or supplementing the provisions of this Order (including anything which might have been the subject of a report of the Business Committee) shall, if not previously concluded, be brought to a conclusion one hour after they have been commenced, and paragraph (1) of Standing Order No. 14 (Exempted business) shall apply to the proceedings.

(2) If on an allotted day on which any proceedings on the Bill are to be brought to a conclusion at a time appointed by this Order or a Resolution of the Business Committee the House is adjourned, or the sitting is suspended, before that time no notice shall be required of a Motion made at the next sitting by a member of the Government for varying or supplementing the provisions of this Order.

Saving

11. Nothing in this Order or a Resolution of the Business Committee shall—

(a) prevent any proceedings to which the Order or Resolution applies from being taken or completed earlier than is required by the Order or Resolution; or
(b) prevent any business (whether on the Bill or not) from being proceeded with on any day after the completion of all such proceedings on the Bill as are to be taken on that clay.

Recommittal

12.—(1) References in this Order to proceedings on consideration or proceedings on Third Reading include references to proceedings at those stages, respectively, for, on or in consequence of, recommittal.

(2) On an allotted day no debate shall be permitted on any Motion to recommit the Bill (whether as a whole or otherwise), and Mr. Speaker shall put forthwith any Question necessary to dispose of the Motion, including the Question on any amendment moved to the Question.

Interpretation

13. In this Order
allotted day" means any day (other than a Friday) on which the Bill is put down as first Government Order of the day, provided that a Motion for allotting time to the proceedings on the Bill to be taken on that day either has been agreed on a previous day, or is set down for consideration on that day;
the Bill" means the Official Secrets Bill;
Resolution of the Business Committee" means a Resolution of the Business Committee as agreed to by the House.

The first thing to say is that no-one can doubt that the Official Secrets Bill is an important measure that goes to the heart of the Government's responsibilities. The Bill is a radical narrowing of the scope of the criminal law. It will repeal section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911, replacing it with much narrower provisions aimed at protecting, and protecting effectively, official information whose unauthorised disclosure would cause a serious degree of harm to the public interest.

Mr. Andrew F. Bennett: Does the Leader of the House accept that "effectively" means that most people will have to obey the law willingly? By shoving the Bill through the House in this way, does he accept that he is destroying much of the impact which the legislation might have? Many people outside this place will be completely disillusioned by the way in which the Bill has been pushed through. Does he accept that he should not be moving a guillotine motion like this on a constitutional matter?

Mr. Wakeham: I will make those points in my speech. I do not accept what the hon. Gentleman has said.

Mr. Tam Dalyell: If I misheard the Leader of the House, I hope that he will correct me. I believe that he used the phrase "a serious degree of harm". That is what he just read from his brief. Where does that appear in the Bill?

Mr. Wakeham: I had better make my speech in my own way. The hon. Gentleman can argue his point in his own way later.
Our proposals outline six specific categories of official information that will continue to be protected by the criminal law. That is fewer than any previous Government have proposed. Within those categories we will introduce a number of tests of harm which the prosecution will have to prove. Our proposals add up to a coherent and ambitious reform which is bolder than anything attempted by any Government in this area since the war.
The House will recall that we published a White Paper in June of last year which was debated in July. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary promised then to listen carefully to the points that were made and to take account of them as the Government prepared the Bill. He has done that. The Bill is a significant further narrowing of the scope

of the criminal law from the White Paper proposals. It has proved difficult to please everyone, but I believe that we have got our proposals right and that the time has come to settle on the successor to section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911, as that section is generally recognised as being too wide and too weak.

Mr. Dalyell: Will the Leader of the House give way?

Mr. Wakeham: No. I will give way later.
The House has already devoted a considerable amount of time to debating our proposals. We had a debate on the White Paper last summer. Just before Christmas, the Bill had a full day's consideration on Second Reading when the House approved it by 298 votes to 221. We have now had two sittings in a Committee of the whole House which have lasted for a total of 13½ hours. However, we have not yet finished considering the first clause and in that time have debated only three groups of amendments.

Mr. David Winnick: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Bob Cryer: rose—

Mr. Wakeham: I will give way in a minute.
There are another 17 or so debates in prospect on amendments already tabled. That is simply not adequate progress for a Bill which has only 16 clauses.

Mr. Winnick: Will the Leader of the House confirm that there was no element of filibustering in those debates and that there were no unduly long speeches or unnecessary interruptions? Will he confirm that, because, on all previous occasions when the right hon. Gentleman has moved a timetable motion, there has always been an accusation that the Bill's opponents have tried to drag out the proceedings? Will he confirm that that has not happened in this case?

Mr. Wakeham: In any of the guillotine motions that I have proposed—I have something of a record for this, as no doubt some hon. Member will tell me in a few moments—I do not believe that I have ever accused anyone of filibustering, not least because the other person will respond, "Oh well, what about Mr. Speaker? Why didn't he rule me out of order?" I do not accuse anyone of filibustering. There were some good speeches, but some of the actual and hypothetical examples of giving information were perhaps a little repetitive and a little wide of the mark. That was my reading of it, but I am not accusing anyone of filibustering.

Mr. Nicholas Budgen: Does my right hon. Friend believe that in every respect the information given by Ministers to the House was accurate? Some of my right hon. and hon. Friends fear that a junior Minister wasted the time of the House for about an hour because he misunderstood the nature of judicial review. I make no criticism of that, as we all make mistakes. However, is that not an inevitable consequence of the proper discussion of a complicated Bill?

Mr. Wakeham: Who is complaining about proper discussion of a complicated Bill?

Mr. Budgen: The Leader of the House is.

Mr. Wakeham: No, I certainly am not. I am trying to propose a timetable motion so that all parts of the Bill can be discussed properly. That is the purpose of the exercise.
I understand the concern felt by some hon. Members about the Bill, but that concern is certainly not shared in other quarters. At one stage during the second day's debate in Committee there were a mere 11 hon. Members on the Opposition Benches.

Mr. Winnick: So?

Mr. Wakeham: I am just going to make the point, if the hon. Gentleman can contain himself, that for three hours there were fewer than 20 Opposition Members present. It is difficult to reconcile the desires of some hon. Members for extended debate on this Bill with my duty as the Leader of the House to ensure that sufficient time is available for all the other measures that attract right hon. and hon. Members' concern to be properly considered by the House.
I believe that we now need to take steps to structure the rest of the discussion on the Bill in a sensible manner. We still have several important issues to debate, including the principles underlying the tests of harm, the category of information obtained in confidenece from other states or international organisations, the prior publication defence and allowing disclosure to hon. Members. By introducing a timetable motion at this stage, adequate time can be given to discussion of those and other measures.

Mrs. Gwyneth Dunwoody: I have no intention of involving myself in this debate. However, on every occasion when it is possible I listen to the debate. The fact that there are fewer hon. Members present is no indication of interest or involvement in the Bill. Hon. Members who come in to listen to the debate are exceptional because hon. Members have a great many other things to do at the same time.

Mr. Wakeham: Absolutely. That accounts for the fact that there are only about 20 hon. Members on the Opposition Benches at the moment. I understand that hon. Members are busy and that many other matters must come to the Floor of the House. That is why I must sometimes resort to a timetable motion to provide the proper allocation of time.

Mr. Teddy Taylor: Does my right hon. Friend agree that one of the basic problems of any guillotine from either side of the House is that sometimes issues are not discussed? Will he assure us that some time will be available to debate the amendment dealing with European papers? Will he endeavour to ensure that there will be time to discuss the important issues?

Mr. Wakeham: I have a great deal of sympathy with my hon. Friend and I shall address that point in a few moments.

Mr. Dennis Skinner: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Wakeham: No, I want to make some progress.

Mr. Skinner: It is only a small point.

Mr. Wakeham: Before I give way to the hon. Gentleman, another important matter of principle must be considered. That is whether some Bills are of such significance that they should not be timetabled. Governments of all persuasions have guillotined Bills of great political and even constitutional importance. On the same day in November 1977, the last Labour Government

guillotined the Scotland Bill and the Wales Bill, both of which would have fundamentally altered the nature of the Union. The Labour Government before that guillotined the House of Commons (Redistribution of Seats) Bill—a controversial constitutional measure if ever there was one.
I do not claim that we have never in turn imposed a timetable on important measures. My right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath) guillotined the European Communities Bill in 1972, and that was followed by a guillotine on the Counter-Inflation (Temporary Provisions) Bill., which was also discussed by a Committee of the whole House.

Mr. Skinner: Earlier, the Leader of the House mentioned that only 20 right hon. and hon. Members are on the Opposition Benches. He failed to say that most right hon. and hon. Members on the Government Benches can be added to those on the Opposition Benches who oppose the guillotine. While the Leader of the House is giving a rundown of previous guillotines, can he say whether he has introduced a guillotine on any Bill, constitutional or otherwise, when as many as 18 Conservative Members were agin it?

Mr. Wakeham: I do not know which right hon. and hon. Members are against the guillotine and which are not. We shall wait for the Division, to see whether the Government win the vote.
So that the Liberal party is not left out of the pantheon, I recall the guillotine in 1911 of the Parliament Bill, which fundamentally altered the constitutional powers of another place. That is the best example I can find, because it is a long time since the Liberals had responsibility for such matters.
Last Thursday, I said that in matters of timetable motions, I bow to the knowledge of the right hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Mr. Foot), who said, when guillotining the Scotland Bill:
it is constitutional Bills for which guillotines arc most required…The House should not give the impression to anybody…that there is something extraordinary, improper or contrary to our traditions in the application of timetable motions to constitutional Bills.
On that occasion, the right hon. Gentleman also observed:
to read my speeches on guillotine motions is almost a liberal education in itself."—[Official Report, 16 November 1977; Vol. 939, c. 585–87.]
The right hon. Gentleman supplied an impressive list of constitutional Bills that had been guillotined. Among the more interesting were the Members of Parliament (Charges and Allegations) Bill 1888, which the right hon. Gentleman thought might have been a constitutional Bill, and the Military Training Bill in 1938–39, which he was sure involved "important questions". I recommend the right hon. Gentleman's speech to hon. and right hon. Members interested in such matters.

Mr. Jeff Rooker: Will the right hon. Gentleman tell the House whether, during the passage of any of the Bills to which he refers, the Government of the day had an overall majority in this House of more than 100?

Mr. Wakeham: What does that have to do with it?

Mr. Rooker: The answer to the right hon. Gentleman's question is simple. So far, the Government have rot moved a closure on a single debate. They can carry any


closure they want. The Government could impose a guillotine as the Bill proceeds, but they choose not to do so, because they do not want the Bill debated.

Mr. Wakeham: That would not necessarily be the best way to proceed. The best way to proceed is by agreement, if we can. If we cannot get agreement, we must introduce a timetable.

Mr. Rooker: The Government do not want to reach any agreement.

Mr. Wakeham: That is absolutely untrue.
I accept that the Official Secrets Bill deals with the interests of the state, as do many bills. It goes to the heart of the Government's responsibilities, and that is why it is being considered by a Committee of the whole House. However, it appears from the precedents that I have cited that there is no Bill, however profoundly it affects the constitution or even the sovereignty of this country, that may not be timetabled. Having established that, it is a matter of whether the proposed timetable is reasonable. I believe that it is.
The motion before the House will allow about another 17 hours for Committee stage on the Floor of the House, making about 30 hours in all. For a Bill of 16 clauses, that is a generous amount of time. There will be a further full day for Report and Third Reading. By the time that the Bill goes to another place, it will have been considered in this Chamber for about 42 hours.

Mr. John Gorst: Can my right hon. Friend say, from his knowledge of precedents, whether any Bill has been guillotined after 13½ hours of debate, and when the majority of time has been taken up by the speeches of Privy Councillors—as opposed to the contributions of ordinary Back Benchers such as myself?

Mr. Wakeham: If any right hon. or hon. Member struggles hard enough, he or she can probably find a precedent. There are certainly precedents for guillotining Bills even earlier. I cite as an example the 1972 anti-inflation Bill of my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Sidcup and Bexley, which was guillotined immediately after Second Reading. Two of the Bills of the right hon. Member for Blaenau, Gwent were also guillotined immediately after Second Reading.

Mr. Jonathan Aitken: Will my right hon. Friend give way?

Mr. Wakeham: No, I shall not.
While the Bill is important, it is not lengthy, and the amount of time allowed for it in Committee is more than adequate.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Shropshire, North (Mr. Biffen) and I are the first two Leaders of the House to defend the use of timetable motions against criticisms from two directions. The more recent of those criticisms is that mounted by the Select Committee on Procedure, whose recommendations in the last Parliament, if put into effect, would mean that almost every Bill of significance or controversy would have a timetable motion for its Committee and further stages.
The second, more traditional line of attack will no doubt come in the speech by the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson), criticising the number of

timetable motions that I have introduced to date. But to make that criticism is to miss an important point. On several previous occasions—particularly during the debate on procedure last November—I made it clear to the House that it is now my practice to move towards the introduction of timetable motions where necessary; and, if possible, at a time that allows for properly apportioned consideration of a Bill. That is in the spirit of the Select Committee's recommendations, although it does not go quite as far as it would like—and inevitably means that timetable motions will become slightly more routine than they once were.

Mr. Aitken: Will my right hon. Friend give way now?

Mr. Wakeham: No, I must continue a little further.
The hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras did not oppose the principle of timetabling in the procedure debate, although he drew attention to the number of Bills that were guillotined last Session. I note that he added:
However, the number was still only six, so we are not reduced to guillotining Bills too frequently."—[Official Report, 30 November 1988; Vol 142, c. 801.]
I agree, and I would like to keep it that way. I strongly believe that the best way to proceed is through discussions and agreement on the issues as they arise. I have spent a great deal of time, both as Patronage Secretary and as Leader of the House, taking matters forward in that way—as I believe is essential to preserve the flexibility that our present procedures provide.
This is an important Bill, and one that needs careful consideration, in whole rather than in part, by the House. Timetables have been imposed on politically important Bills before, and no new precedent is being set today. The motion before the House allows generous time for discussing the remaining part of the Bill.

Mr. Aitken: My right hon. Friend says that no new precedent is being set. Is he aware of the important correspondence between the Home Secretary and my right hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Mr. Amery), in which the Home Secretary repudiates an important series of assurances given on the Floor of the House of Commons by my hon. Friend the Minister of State, Home Office? Surely it is right that those repudiations should be properly debated, and that room be made in the timetable for that discussion?

Mr. Wakeham: There is plenty of time to debate everything that is relevant, and I have no doubt that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary will deal with the points to which my hon. Friend refers when he winds up the debate. The time allowed by the motion for discussion of the Bill is adequate, and I commend it to the House.

Mr. Frank Dobson: This is the third guillotine motion moved by the Leader of the House in four weeks. The first two were objectionable, but this is much worse. This latest motion is particularly objectionable because it seeks to curtail debate on proposals that go to the heart of the relationship between the citizens of this country and the state, the servants of the state, and those who, for the time being, control the apparatus of the state—usually referred to as the Government.
Tonight's debate also goes to the heart of the relationship between Government and this elected House.


The Government accept that the Official Secrets Bill is sufficiently important for its Committee stage to be debated on the Floor of the House. But now they want to curtail that debate, and one must ask why. So far, the Committee stage has taken just 13½ hours, spread over two days. As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr. Rooker) pointed out, on both days the Government themselves adjourned the debate. On neither day was there any question of repetition or of unnecessarily extended debate.
Even the Home Secretary has commented favourably on what he called
the long debate which has gone to the heart of necessary"—
I emphasise "necessary"—
discussion of the BiII."—[Official Report, 2 February 1989; Vol. 146, c. 527.]
I must admit that that was generous of the right hon. Gentleman, because those speaking against the Bill have not only outnumbered its supporters but worsted them at every stage—so much so that some Conservative Members who wandered into the Chamber out of curiosity to listen to the debate stayed to speak against the Bill. No doubt some of them were as appalled as I was to hear some modern Tories abandon Winston Churchill's motto "Trust the people" and replace it with what has been the motto of the lackey since time immemorial, "Trust the people in charge". I hope that that idea is offensive even to some modern Tories.
One problem has been the inability, or unwillingness, of Ministers to answer questions raised by right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House or to provide anything approaching a lucid or convincing explanation of their own Bill. Ministers have been reduced at times to trying to reassure Conservative Members with soothing words from Home Office press releases. Unfortunately, the soothing words do not appear on the face of the Bill, and it is the Bill that we are being asked to enact, not Home Office press releases.

Mr. Nigel Spearing: Does my hon. Friend agree that, despite continual comments and requests, no Law Officer has been present to assist the Home Secretary to answer the important legal questions which, if we are to have confidence in the legislation, the Government should be only too willing to provide?

Mr. Dobson: That is certainly the case, but perhaps my hon. Friend has more faith in the lucidity of Law Officers than I have.
The Government can scarcely complain about time being taken in debate when ministerial speeches have often raised more questions than they have answered. The Minister of State might reasonably be expected to thank the dozen hon. Members who spoke briefly between 10·30 pm and 11·30 pm on Thursday 25 January and so gave him time to find out that one aspect of the Bill would be subject to judicial review. He had thrice previously asserted that it would not. If the Home Secretary wants to save time, I suggest that he ensure that his Ministers give the right answers from the start.
All in all, the Government's response to Committee stage questioning has been contradictory and unconvincing. When pressed to explain the drafting of the Bill, they fall back on the oldest cop-out of all. They say, in effect, "Something must be done about the Official Secrets Act. This is something; therefore this must be done." That is not a good enough response on a Bill of this significance.
Even if the debates had been more protracted, that would be no reason to curtail them. We are not discussing trivial matters. If passed in its present form, the Bill will be, in part, contrary to the principles of natural justice and to the fundamentals of the rule of law.

Mr. Cryer: Does my hon. Friend agree that, if there was any extension to the debate it was by the Government, who sent the Whips scurrying around to get hold of some Tory hack to speak for the Bill? The views expressed on both sides of the House were 99 per cent. against the tenets of the Bill.

Mr. Dobson: I understand that a process somewhat similar to that described by my hon. Friend took place during the debate on Thursday 2 February.
We are talking about a Bill that affects the principles of natural justice and the rule of law. Hon. Members must ask the question: if the House of Commons cannot find time to debate such matters, what do the Government suggest we should debate instead? For what business should we find more time?

Mr. Budgen: Motions congratulatory of the Government.

Mr. Dobson: They do naught else at the Cabinet table.
Since time immemorial, the laws of this land have made murder unlawful. In one way or another, they have obliged every one of us, without exception, to report murder and to ensure that it is investigated and punished. If passed, the Bill will not only relieve members of the security services of that timeless obligation but oblige them not to report murder or to see it investigated or punished. We cannot tolerate the use of an Act to breach the most fundamental rule of law, which is that all are equal before the law, be they individual citizens or public servants.
The Bill seeks to introduce a noxious innovation into the law of the land. It springs from the recently invented, proposterous notion that members of the security services have a lifelong duty of absolute silence about anything they learn in the course of their work. No one has ever suggested, even in more oppressive earlier times, that such a duty was absolute. To make that duty absolute, the House is being asked to approve a Bill that does not merely countenance the possibility of a cover-up of murder by the security services but enforces it by law. That cannot be right.
I shall give an example of what might happen. The House will recall that members of the French security service, in an unforgivable act of state terrorism, blew up the British-registered Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in harbour in Auckland, New Zealand, and killed one of the crew. Let us suppose that that or similar actions were carried out by members of the British Security Service, not necessarily with authority from the top but perhaps as an act of private enterprise on the part of some Security Service oddball such as Peter Wright or his friends.
Under the Bill, a member of the Security Service could not report such a murder except to someone within, or closely associated with, the security services. Such people in the higher echelons—[Interruption.] The Home Secretary says, "What about the police?" The matter has been raised time and time again in Committee, and he and his colleagues have failed to come up with any convincing


argument included in the Bill to show that what I am saying is wrong, and that a member of the Security Service could report such a matter to the police.
I remind the Home Secretary that, in the words of the Prime Minister, there is "a lifelong absolute duty" of silence, not one that can be varied so that someone can report matters to the police if he does not like what his bosses are doing.
If anyone among the higher echelons were informed of such a matter, they might prefer to keep it quiet, for what they would call "reasons of state". Such reasons would be not upsetting the Government and people of New Zealand, or the people of this country, by revealing the existence of some uncontrolled far-Right freaks roaming round in the Security Service. Is that the sort of country in which Conservative Members want to live?
Let us examine another crucial aspect of the Bill. Few can deny that it can be in the public interest to release official secrets without authority. A good example of this, which has been mentioned in the debates, was the information provided about the state of London's air defences before the second world war to Duncan Sandys. His use of that information was profoundly embarrassing to the then Government. As a result of his revelations, work to correct what was wrong was undertaken sooner than might otherwise have been the case. Who would now deny that that was in the public interest? Yet the Government at the time argued that it was not.
Up to now, civil servants or service personnel who disclosed a secret have been able to claim that the disclosure was in the public interest. That argument has not been used very often in the courts but, in a sense, it is not the use of the public interest defence but the existence of that defence which is so crucial. It existence both restrains Governments from mounting prosecutions and colours their attitude to secrecy. In Winston Churchill's words—and he should know, because he voted for it in 1911—the Official Secrets Act was
intended for spies, crooks, traitors and traffickers in official information.
The Official Secrets Act was not intended to protect the Government from scandal being revealed or to prevent them from being found out when they lie, deceive or disinform, as all Governments do. Surely we as a Parliament have not sunk so low that we want to introduce new laws to protect official wrongdoing. That is what we could do tonight.
Under the Bill, if civil servants know that a wrong has been done, they must send their complaint up the hierarchy, so that ultimately if the top dogs decide to do nothing, wrongdoing will be left unpunished and unheard of. If by the Bill we remove the threat of exposure backed up by the plea of public interest, those in the higher echelons of the Civil Service will no longer feel under any pressure to do the right thing for fear of exposure, because all disclosure will become an absolute offence. All the Government's arguments against the public interest defence depend on the existence of whistleblowers at the top of the Civil Service. Is that realistic? As Shakespeare said,
A dog's obeyed in office.
Perhaps we should call to mind the gyrations, over the Westland and "Spycatcher" affairs of Sir Robert Armstrong, at that time supreme guardian of the

professional ethics of the Civil Service or, in colloquial terms, the whistleblower-in-chief. Few can doubt that sadly, by the end of his career, he had reached the stage where "his little wooden whistle wouldn't whistle."
Let us take another example. Supposing, today, a Government press officer knows that she is being asked to peddle deceptive information, or to mislead the press about something said by an apponent of the Government from the Tory or the Labour party. To whom should she turn to complain about being forced into an act contrary to the ethics of her profession? The answer is she should complain to the head of profession for Government information officers. Who is that peerless pearl of ethical rectitude, and where can he or she be found? Since last Thursday, the answer is a Mr. Bernard Ingham, and her complaint should be addressed to 10 Downing street.
Let us suppose that the press officer does not fancy complaining about her enforced deception of the public to Mr. Ingham. Who could blame her? As she is being honest and truthful, she may decide to ring up a journalist and say, "What I told you yesterday was a lot of cock and bull. The eggs have salmonella, the hospital waiting lists have been doctored, nuclear electricity costs more than that from conventional power stations." If the information that she then discloses is classified, that honest act will be an offence under the Bill, rendering press officer, journalist or broadcaster, newspaper or television or radio station liable to prosecution without being able to mount the defence that the revised information is the truth and that it was in the public interest for the truth to come out.

The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Douglas Hurd): Will the shadow Leader of the House tell us under what clause of the Bill persons could be prosecuted for that offence?

Hon. Members: Answer.

Mr. Dobson: There seems to be some hesitation among Conservative Members [Interruption.] If that press officer had been designated as one of the people connected with such material, and that material was classified—(HON. MEMBERS: "Where?"] As my right hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Leeds, South (Mr. Rees) pointed out, the NHS review was classified as secret, and it would have been wrong to disclose it.

Mr. Hurd: Will the hon. Gentleman say in which clause of the Bill a test of classification of documents exists? The shadow Leader of the House simply has not bothered to master the Bill which he is discussing.

Mr. Dobson: If she had been notified as such a person—I am sorry if I got the phraseology wrong—she would be committing an offence. It is no good the Secretary of State pretending that it is not the case. [Interruption.] A Conservative Member is suggesting that no one in the Government press service would be notified in that way. Is he really suggesting that the chief Government press officer is not likely to be notified that he deals in matters involving the Security Service? I simply do not believe that.
Unless I am utterly off the beam, it is clear that plenty of people at the Department of Energy who deal with nuclear power stations and such matters will be notified. In the dim and distant past, because of my involvement in the nuclear side of the electricity industry, I was involved in classification of material, clearances and so on. I do not


think that there is any evidence that the nuclear side of the electricity industry or matters involving the energy industry have changed in any respect.

Mr. Dalyell: Perhaps the Home Secretary could help us by telling us what would happen to Colette Bowe if by some chance someone opened her bank vault? She put her account of events in a bank vault and under clause 5(2) of the Bill—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: (Mr. Harold Walker): Order. We are not discussing that subsection or any other subsection. We are discussing the motion on the Order Paper. I do not see any reference to that subsection on the Order Paper [Interruption.] Order. Mr. Dobson.

Mr. Dobson: I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) is on the ball again. Would the bank clerk who opened the vault be guilty under that arrangement, if the Government could find out who that person was and select him as covered by the Bill?
Everyone agrees that the existing Official Secrets Act is bad, but in many respects the new Bill is worse. It infringes our civil liberties, breaches the principle of natural justice, sets some public officials above the law and makes Ministers the sole unchallengeable judges of the public interest. We are used to seeing our country slip down the economic league table.

Mr. Gorst: The hon. Gentleman has produced a catalogue of the offences that the Bill commits to society, but he has left out one important offence. Article 10 of the European convention on human rights states:
Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to … receive and impart information … without interference by public authorities and regardless of frontiers.
Perhaps the hon. Gentleman should address himself to that supreme violation which the Bill will commit.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I hope that right hon. and hon. Members will address themselves to the motion before the House.

Mr. Gorst: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. is it not germane to our discussions to consider what has to be discussed under the guillotine?

Mr. Deputy Speaker: If the hon. Gentleman can draw to my attention the relevant part of the motion before the House, I might have some consideration for what he says.

Mr. Norman Buchan: Clause 5(2).

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I am talking about the motion before the House, which I hope right hon. and hon. Members will address.

Mr. Gorst: Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am not disputing your ruling in any way, but my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House itemised the matters for which he was allowing sufficient time. I was pointing out that there might not be sufficient time for us to consider the question of human rights.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Can we get on? Mr. Dobson.

Mr. Budgen: Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Is not the discussion of the European convention on human rights absolutely essential to the Bill—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman makes the point that it is essential to the discussion of the Bill. We are not discussing the Bill; we are discussing the allocation of time motion. Mr. Dobson.

Mr. Dobson: In earlier debates in Committee and on Second Reading, there have been references to conflicts between the European convention on human rights and the provisions of the Bill. That is one reason why my right hon. and hon. Friends and some Conservative Members want more time to debate the Bill—to have the opportunity to expose the problems which arise on the European convention on human rights. I must tell the hon. Member for Hendon, North (Mr. Gorst) that the convention is more qualified than he suggested.
Everybody agrees that the Bill infringes our civil liberties. Some of the changes infringe our civil liberties more than they have been infringed already. The hon. Member—

Mr. Skinner: Muttering, "Tony Berry, Tony Berry, Blue Arrow, Blue Arrow, what have I done?"

Mr. Dobson: I think that I had better not respond to any interventions.
The Secretary of State for Education and Science recently appointed a national curriculum working group for history. He told it:
The study of history in schools should help pupils come to understand how a free and democratic society has developed over the centuries".
As a schoolboy and as a student, I, like many others, studied just that—how our freedoms and democracy developed. Anybody who studies their development must conclude that it took a lot of effort. It was an uphill struggle. People at the bottom had to push democratic rights against all manner of obstruction from people at the top. When we study the development of our democracy, certain events, movements and individuals stand out, but they are not all on the same side. There are two lists. There are those who worked to extend democracy and those who worked against it.
Whatever the period being studied, one thing is fairly predictable—Home Secretaries seldom feature in the roll of honour. Home Secretaries are the ones against whom writs of habeas corpus are issued, who wrongfully arrest people, who issue general warrants, who suspend the law of habeas corpus, who nobble juries or even contrive, with their Dorset relatives, to get the Tolpuddle martyrs transported to Australia.

Mr. Patrick McLoughlin: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Can you confirm that the same rules of order as apply to Back Benchers apply to Front Benchers, and that this is not a Second Reading debate?

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Mr. Dobson.

Mr. Dobson: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Perhaps the hon. Member for Derbyshire, West (Mr. McLoughlin) will be able to follow what I am saying. With the Bill, the Home Secretary is trying to inscribe his name on the list of his rather more authoritarian predecessors. How they would have loved some aspects of the Bill—its absolute duty of silence, absolute rights for Ministers to decide what is in the public interest and absolute authority to keep their secrets above the law. Until now, the people, the


press and Parliament have held out against the introduction of such absolutes. I like to hope that the House will hold out again tonight.

Mr. Edward Heath: I asked the Leader of the House at business questions on Thursday whether he would change his mind about tonight's motion. As he has not done so, I must again express my regret that he should introduce this motion and the guillotine on this Bill. I do not say, "on the Bill at this stage", but, "on this Bill".
The Home Secretary has himself emphasised the Bill's immense importance. At the conclusion of the debate on Thursday, he paid me the compliment of saying that some of my remarks had gone to the heart of the Bill, which is the relationship between the freedom of the individual and the overriding power of all-powerful Governments. Of course I still think that—it is the basis of the Bill and the important point in it.
There is much to be discussed in the Bill and there is much to be discussed on the amendments, which requires time. I am saddened by the fact that neither in his answer on the business statement on Thursday nor in his speech tonight has the Leader of the House set out a single reason why the guillotine should be introduced on this Bill. There has been absolutely no attempt to protract the time taken on it—when I have listened, and I have listened a great deal—by either side of the House.
At business questions, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House attacked the Opposition for having only 11 Members here for the debate. I would not deny that, nor would I detract from the fact, if it were true, that they were paying very little attention to it, but what concerns me is the fact that the Conservative Benches were filled for most of the time, and it was only towards the end of the debate that one or two of my hon. Friends were prepared to support the Government.
It has been apparent in debate and in remarks afterwards that the Home Secretary has not succeeded in convincing Conservative Members that he has met their points about the relationship between the individual and the Government. We have paid compliments to the Home Secretary and the Government on what they have done since the White Paper, but I must tell my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House that debate on the White Paper is not the same as debate on the Bill and cannot be taken into account when considering the amount of time spent on the Bill. We have had 13½ hours of debate so far, and we are promised a total of 30.
What other arguments did my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House use? He said that he must make time for remaining legislation. With the greatest respect, that is not a justification for a guillotine. Our party has been returned to power three times in succession on the basis of our introducing less legislation, because we do not believe in it and because it does not give Parliament proper time to consider what there is. Instead, we have had more and more legislation. It has been ill prepared, half digested and not given proper consideration in the House of Commons. We are coming to rely increasingly on the upper Chamber to deal with legislation instituted by the Government, which comes from this Chamber.
I am old fashioned enough to think that that is not a good thing. I have never been in favour of abolishing the other place, but nor am I in favour of its having more power, which is what is happening automatically now. It has more time to consider legislation, and it votes boldly according to what it believes to be right. I cannot accept that we have to abbreviate consideration of this Bill to make way for more legislation.

Mr. Budgen: My right hon. Friend has often been attacked by many of our hon. Friends, who reflect that there is a certain irony here. His time as Prime Minister is now described as authoritarian, yet many of our hon. Friends use guillotines such as my right hon. Friend introduced as a precedent for being equally authoritarian. If they wish to attack my right hon. Friend, should they not learn from the mistakes of 1970–74 rather than emulate them?

Mr. Heath: I am delighted that my hon. Friend and I find ourselves together on the same side. I agree with him. I did not wish to introduce a personal element, but I intended to comment briefly on that point, because I see that some of my hon. Friends have been commenting outside the House.
My hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr. Hamilton), who I think is not here this evening—he has to come from rather a long way away—referred to my "rack and thumbscrew days". I was Chief Whip of this party from 1955 to 1959. I can remember those dictatorial and authoritarian days. At that time, my hon. Friend the Member for Tatton was aged six and my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North (Mr. Marlow), who also, unfortunately is not here tonight, was aged 10. Obviously they too were deeply affected by the rack and the thumbscrew so extensively used on those occasions. What is more, I have had the benefit of advice from people in parliamentary offices, and I see that so extensive was our use of those powers as a whole that between 1955 and 1959, during which period I was Chief Whip, the guillotine was used, altogether, twice. I hope that we stand corrected.
Then we had the period of my premiership—1970 to 1974. Of course, in those days we still had Cabinet government, and the business was arranged by the Leader of the House and the Chief Whip, not by me. I see that the Home Secretary is frowning. In those terrible days—they had got much worse by that time—in those four years, the guillotine was used three times. That shows how monstrous my behaviour has been over the years.
Of course, there were those who criticised the action of the then Government over the European Communities Bill 1972—the accession legislation. I was delighted to see my hon. Friend the Member for Southend, East (Mr. Taylor) in the Lobby with me last Thursday night. I think it is worth reminding ourselves what happened in 1972. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House will remember that, before the actual Bill was dealt with, we had seven days' discussion, during which we reached the final decision that led to the Bill—seven days' discussion. When the Bill was introduced we had three full days' discussion. We then had 88 hours in Committee before the guillotine was introduced, and after its introduction we had some 90 hours' further discussion. The European Communities Bill was shorter than this one—it had only 11 clauses—yet that is the amount of time we spent on it. And that was after the Opposition had announced officially, as the right hon.


Member for Blaenau, Gwent (Mr. Foot) the former leader of the Labour party will remember, that they were determined to break the Bill in any way they possibly could and to use every manoeuvre to do so.

Mr. Skinner: The Government's majority was down to eight.

Mr. Heath: Well, we got the Bill. [Interruption.] Yes, we hear the question about the Prices and Incomes Bill. That too was legislation that had to be dealt with at once because it was a matter of national emergency. [Interruption.] It was indeed, and the amount of time spent on it was vast. Nobody can say that this Bill, which reforms an Act that was put on the statute book in 1911, is of such desperate urgency that we cannot treat it properly in debate on the Floor of the Chamber.
I still believe that this guillotine is a great mistake. Let me say two things. First, the Leader of the House announced in his statement tonight that he does not accept in full the recommendation of the Committee on Procedure that every Bill should be timetabled, although he tends to adopt the attitude that most of them will be. In fact, there is no change in attitude here, because under this Government, since 1979, 47 Bills have been guillotined. That is what has been happening.
Of course, consideration of a permanent guillotine for all Bills is nothing new. It was considered in 1959, when Rab Butler was Leader of the House. At that time I was Chief Whip, and I was inclined to favour a permanent arrangement. Since then, I have thought about the matter constantly, and I have been thinking about it in the context of this Bill, and it seems to me that there are very great problems. One is the problem of getting agreement about the initial timetable and about what would happen if one did not get agreement.
Secondly, if there were a timetable in respect of every piece of legislation, a large part of the pressure on a Government to consider the views expressed in the House would he removed. Therefore, I would no longer argue that we should have a timetable for every Bill, or even for most Bills.
My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Lawrence), who is also absent tonight, spoke at the end of the debate on Thursday evening. He said that the Bill was absolutely right, that if it were changed to take public interest into account, offences would be committed, and it would be wrong to have offences committed. Now, this seems to me to be an unusual view from a member of the legal profession. However, I quite understand the consequences of it: there will no longer be any requirement for counsel for the defence; one just has counsel for the prosecution, and they are therefore sure of getting their fees. They do their job: they prosecute, they go away, and everything is settled.

Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman: That is a cheap gibe.

Mr. Heath: I have an even cheaper one coming for my hon. Friend.

Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman: rose—

Mr. Heath: Allow me to make my double gibe, and then I will give way to my hon. Friend.
My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Burton finished by saying, "Let us have a timetable on everything

and get away to bed." That is what interested him—not the freedom of the individual, not the position of the state or the Government, not the responsibilities of this House, in legislation, to our constituents and to the country. No, let us get it away and let us get to bed. The only thing that concerns him is how early he can get to bed.
That is my double gibe. I now give way to my hon. Friend.

Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman: I was observing that it was a quite uncalled for gibe against a very good member of the legal profession. The right hon. Gentleman is very rarely here, so he gets to bed very often.

Mr. Heath: I am sorry that my hon. Friend is so annoyed because I am here.
I urge my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House to think again very carefully before working on the basis that all legislation is going to be guillotined in this way.

Mr. Hugh Dykes: Will my right hon. Friend give way?

Mr. Heath: I have taken up far too much time already.

Mr. Dykes: My right hon. Friend has just referred to the danger of the Government's getting into the habit, as would happen under these arrangements, of paying less attention to what the House says and feeling that less effort is required to get a very heavy programme of legislation through—not only this Bill, but other matters. Is he aware of, and is he disturbed by, the growing reality that the Government are really rather reluctant to accept any amendments suggested in Committee on any Bill whatsoever, other than very marginal amendments involving minuscule technical matters?

Mr. Heath: My hon. Friend has made what is, of course, a very important point. The only thing I could detect from the speech of my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House this evening that justified him was that the Government have had enough of this Bill and they want to be rid of it. Indeed, he said so quite frankly. He said, "We have had enough time on it; let us get on with something else"—presumably food, since we really must find something we can eat and drink, and that now requires legislation.
Let me follow up my hon. Friend's point. I have said before that I find it unparliamentary that the Government not only take no notice of amendments or proposals but often fail to answer any questions that are put to them in debate. However, I do not want to go into that. All I want to say is that I read with astonishment the leader in The Times today opposing this guillotine. It is not customary for The Times to be out of the hands of the press office at Number 10, but with its leader today that is what happened. The significance of that leader was that it pointed out the danger to this Government of the suspicion outside of Parliament and outside this country that—to use the customary phrase—they are being economical with the truth, that the rest of the world is not being told the whole story.
Twice I have asked whether, under the new system, Irangate would become known in this country. No Minister has been prepared to give an answer to that question, because the answer is that it would not become known in this country. All that would have gone on under a Government who could hide and carry through policies


of that kind, knowing that they were absolutely safe. That must be sorted out. We may not yet have done it; I do not believe that we have. However, just because we have not done it does not justify a guillotine.
It is fruitless, I know, to ask the Leader of the House to withdraw the motion; however, I hope that he realises the opposition to it and how basic is that opposition. I hope that he also realises that this procedure should not be followed lightly, certainly not with constitutional Bills, in the future conduct of the business of the House.

Mr. Michael Foot: The right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath) has made, as he did on Thursday, such a speech that he has carried all before him. I cannot imagine how the Government can provide an adequate reply to such a speech as he has delivered. I have to say in parenthesis that I did not quite recognise the beneficent regime that he operated when he was Prime Minister and Chief Whip, although he was right to quote the figures about guillotines. I happened to be in the House at that time and I opposed some of his measures. The speech that the right hon. Gentleman has made today will carry great weight in the country, even if it does not carry the vote in the House—as it should.
I suppose that I ought to be slightly flattered by what the Leader of the House said at the beginning of his speech. He sought to take shelter behind what he said were my actions in order to justify what he is doing. In a roundabout way, I suppose that I could take that as a compliment—not that I think that the right hon. Gentleman wishes to pay me such a compliment. However, there are startling and sharp differences between what happened in my time and what is happening now.
My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr. Rooker) was right to say that it makes a very big difference if the Government have a majority of 130 or 140. That is the kind of majority that this Government enjoy. We had a majority of only two or three. If we had not introduced guillotine motions, there would not have been the slightest chance of passing any legislation. The Government apparatus would have been utterly destroyed. That is very different from the present position. If the Leader of the House had allowed the Bill to go forward according to the normal procedure for debates, the Government's ability to pass this measure and a range of other measures would not have been destroyed.
Another factor, which is interwoven with the point that I have just made, concerns timing. There have been important occasions when guillotine motions have been introduced early in the Session. However, the five excellent measures to which the guillotine was applied in one day, for which I was criticised, were introduced towards the end of a Session. There is a big difference between the introduction of guillotines towards the end of a Session and those that are introduced right at the beginning of a Session. If a guillotine is not introduced for a measure that is being debated towards the end of a Session, the measure will be lost and the legislative programme will collapse. The Leader of the House has no right to compare what was done by the Government at that time with what he is doing now.
The right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup suggested that one of the major reasons for the introduction of the guillotine motion today is because of the huge Government majority. The Government do not care much about the House of Commons. The Prime Minister spends very little time in the House of Commons. She does not worry very much about what happens here. She just says to her Ministers, "Get the business through the House of Commons. It does not matter what kind of measure it is. You have a good majority. You know when to introduce the guillotine at the best time." There has been an appalling deterioration in the way in which legislation is dealt with.
I would bet that the pressure on parliamentary draftsmen during the last two or three years has been growing greater and greater. The drafting of Bills is a very skilled affair. People need time to do it. If parliamentary draftsmen are given only a short time in which to draft Bills, what comes to the House of Commons—or what, which is even more important, spills into the House of Lords—is in an appalling mess. More and more of the measures that the Government have introduced during the last few years have been so shoddy and illiterate and have been presented to the House in such a miserable form that the Leader of the House on a series of occasions, because of the log jam at the end of the Session, has had to introduce guillotine motions to get them through. That is another way in which the House of Commons has not been properly treated.
The prophecy was made by those who were subsequently removed from the Cabinet that the Government's huge majority would have an effect on the way that the country is governed. It has certainly had a huge effect on the way in which Parliament has been mangled and misused. That is happening at an increasing rate. When the Leader of the House introduces a guillotine on this measure, the offence is even greater—though not because it is a constitutional measure. The right hon. Gentleman was right to refer to what happened in 1911, the last time that the Liberal party had the chance to introduce a guillotine.
It is quite true that on constitutional matters—because of the clashes on great issues, both in the country and in this House—guillotine motions have to be introduced in order to ensure that the measures are passed. I am glad that the Leader of the House's education has been improved by reading all my past speeches, but I have never said that there can never be a guillotine on a constitutional measure just because it is a constitutional measure. That would be quite wrong. However, when a Government with a huge majority have nearly a whole Session ahead of them within which to get important measures through, it is wrong of them to choose this measure for a guillotine and to force it through in that way. It is a disgrace both to the House of Commons and to the Leader of the House.
I do not believe that even the Leader of the House would have done it, had he come here to listen to the debates. It was quite often my custom to come and listen to debates in which I did not even participate. It is the duty of the Leader of the House to do that. Before he introduced this motion, knowing what fury it would arouse on both sides of the House, he ought to have listened to the debate. Had he listened to the speech of the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup last Thursday and to previous general debates, I do not believe


that he would have moved this motion, because he would have heard the demand that the Law Officers should attend the debates.
When we ask for the presence of the Government's legal representatives so that they may expound these matters, we do so not because we think that they are the only people who can help us to understand what is provided for in the Bill but because we believe that it is an important issue, particularly when there happen to be such grave differences about the way in which the Bill has been presented. We are discussing legislation that will affect the country for the next 10 or 20 years. It is a disgrace that, after all our demands, not a single Law Officer has come to listen to the debate. The Prime Minister could send her civil servants and Law Officers all over the world to defend her Government, but she did not ask them to come here to listen to what was said in the House of Commons and to give authoritative answers on these matters.
If the Leader of the House was even thinking of introducing a guillotine motion on the Bill, he ought to have taken the trouble to come here and listen to the debate. Anybody who had listened to last Thursday's debate could not honestly have come here today and said that the debate ought to be truncated. Leaders of the House whom I can recall used to listen to the debates and would not have come forward with such a proposition in the circumstances. However, we are in a new situation, thanks largely to the Government's majority, and that is why legislation that is an infringement of civil liberties goes through Parliament.
The Leader of the House or the Home Secretary may be opposed to such legislation, although I am not sure which of those two contenders is most opposed to it. The Football Spectators Bill has been introduced in the House of Lords and it is so appalling that it may be to the Government's credit that they do not have the nerve to introduce it in the House of Commons. They know how shocking that Bill is. When the Bill comes to this House, we shall have to deal with it. It is another example of the way in which the Government act. The Leader of the House must take the chief responsibility because he is the person who should tell the Prime Minister that such legislation should stop and that the House does not want any more of it. He should pluck up his courage to do that.
People used to say—even Conservatives at election times—that a Conservative Government would not have a great legislative programme like previous Labour Governments. Yet more ill-digested, shoddy legislation has been forced through in the past two years than at any time that I can recall. That is due to the fact that the legislative decisions on major matters are made not by the Select Committee on Procedure, where the Leader of the House is supposed to preside, but by the Prime Minister, perhaps on the corrupt advice of Mr. Bernard Ingham, who has now been promoted.
Certainly, the Government would never proceed without that corrupt advice being offered, either first or last. I use that word advisedly because I would not have dared to use it if it had not been so appositely employed by the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup.
The Government, however, have made one change. I recall that in years gone by, the Government used to talk about the legislative machine of Parliament being transformed into a sausage machine. The Leader of the House has at least modernised matters. This is now a factory-farm Parliament: one privatisation measure after

another has been brought in which has to eat the entrails of its predecessors, so there will be an outbreak of parliamentary salmonella. No one knows where the next outbreak of the disease will be, although it seems that on this Bill, the outbreak is among Conservative Members.
It seems that we may have an intervention in the debate by the right hon. Member for Chingford (Mr. Tebbit). He has not attended the previous debates on the Bill, so I hope that the House will give him a proper reception if he tries to give his advice on a debate that he has not heard and does not understand. He comes here merely to serve the Government's interests. I am not sure who else's interests he is serving. There are plenty of those in his subsequent moonlighting career as well.
I hope that the Leader of the House will listen to the debate, and that the Government can learn from it and take back to the Prime Minister the instructions of the House of Commons that we are not going to have any more of it.

Sir Peter Emery: No one who has attended the debate and followed, as I do, the two previous speakers, could comment that there is not some interest in the debate. Seldom have I heard my right hon. Friend :he Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath) more humorous, even though I did not always agree with what he was saying.
The right hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Mr. Foot) referred to the parliamentary draftsmen. I should like him to point out any time when the parliamentary draftsmen were not under pressure. Every Government have kept them under pressure. I was the first—perhaps the only—Minister to venture into their office, just below the Scottish Office, when I had to have some amendments dealt with quickly. It is a place that Ministers are not normally meant to visit. I found then that the permanent view was that parliamentary draftsmen were always under pressure, so that is nothing new in this Parliament or any other.
Equally, that is true of what my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup said. Every Government that I have known since I came to the House in 1959 have said that they wanted less legislation and that they would make legislation simpler and easier for everyone to comprehend. That never comes about and every Government, of whatever politics or party, fall down completely on that.
The hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr. Rooker) suggested that the guillotine was not necessary because the Government could have used their majority to introduce motions to shorten the debate. But there would have been immense criticism from Labour Members that the power of a majority was being rolled in time and time again to introduce motions to shorten or to close the debate.
Over the past four years, the Select Committee on Procedure has been trying to work for orderly debate. It is wrong for my right hon. Friend to suggest that the Select Committee on Procedure has been working for every piece of legislation to be guillotined. The view of the Committee is that we should do two things. First, we should not waste large amounts of time on the first few clauses of a Bill, so ensuring that later clauses are not debated. Secondly, we should try to ensure that every clause is debated before the


Bill goes to the House of Lords. If those two conditions could be brought about, the Committee suggests that we should have achieved something.

Mr. Buchan: I believe that the hon. Gentleman is, honourably, in error. It is not correct, as the Home Secretary and the Leader of the House have said, that we have been concentrating on clause 1. Clause 1 is connected to almost all the other clauses and we have been discussing the rest of the Bill in relation to clause 1. Some of the amendments seek to amend later clauses. Those on the Government Front Bench are misleading the House.

Sir Peter Emery: The hon. Gentleman has misunderstood me. I am saying—not only of this Bill but of all Bills—that we are concerned that time is not wasted on the earlier clauses, thus ensuring that there is not a full debate on the later clauses. It seems that if the debates on the remaining amendments to clause 1 had run as long as they had for the first three amendments in the 15 hours of debate, a guillotine would have been introduced much later and we should then not have been able to debate the later clauses.
One of the problems about the use of the timetable procedure is that every time a timetable motion is introduced, we do not debate the motion itself, but have a Second Reading debate. The speech made by the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson) was 92 per cent. criticism of the Bill and was more like a Second Reading contribution. It has nothing to do with the timetable.
It would have been better if, on the six occasions last year when we had a half-day's debate on a timetable motion, we could have worked out, from the suggestions of the Select Committee on Procedure, three days of parliamentary time—a considerable amount of time in the overall year—which could have been used for many other purposes, such as to debate European legislation. The Select Committee on European Legislation would be delighted with that. Alternatively, if extra time could be given to private Members' Bills, Private Members would be delighted. That would be much better than the arid debate tonight and on other occasions when the guillotine is introduced.

Mr. Nigel Spearing: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for pointing out the need for proper consideration of legislation that arises from the European Economic Community. However, does he agree that one of the fundamental objections to the line that he is pursuing is that, although we would all wish every clause to be given reasonable consideration, if a date has to be set as a result of that desire, the degree of certainty for any Government increases and the degree of uncertainty diminishes. That is an important factor in keeping control of any Government. It should be kept in some uncertainty until the House decides what to do.

Sir Peter Emery: Normally, I have great respect for the hon. Gentleman, but I must say that he is talking as though he were in "Alice in Wonderland". When the Chief Whip decides what legislation is to go through the House, he provisionally marks the dates on which it will come out of Committee, be considered on Report, and go to the House of Lords. If at any time the Government do not

succeed with that timetable, a guillotine motion is introduced. It is wrong to think that, since 1945, the Opposition have stopped a Bill getting on to the statute book because of the time that has been used in Committee. Never has that happened. Every Government ensure that that does not happen, by introducing guillotine motions.

Mr. Gorst: Will my right hon. Friend give way?

Sir Peter Emery: Several hon. Members wish to speak.

Mr. Gorst: It is a quick point.

Sir Peter Emery: I will give way to my hon. Friend.

Mr. Gorst: The fallacy of my hon. Friend's argument is that, on this occasion, much of the opposition to the motion comes from Conservative Members, not the Opposition.

Sir Peter Emery: When the Labour party was in power, there was certain opposition from hon. Members who are no longer below the Gangway. Guillotines were introduced to deal with any opposition. Governments do not care where opposition comes from. They will go forward with the legislation that they want. Anybody who believes the opposite does not understand what Governments are about.
The opposition to this timetable motion is a lot of nonsense. If it were serious and sincere opposition, why do I not see an amendment to it? The motion is to allow two days for debate. Why is there no amendment to allow three or four days for debate? I should have thought that that is the most obvious step to take if hon. Members were serious. If it is thought that the Government will not provide any extra time in a day, why do I not see an amendment to allow the proceedings to continue until any hour after 10 o'clock?
If the Opposition were serious—two ex-Prime Ministers have spoken about the matter—and if there had been amendments in the name of the Leader of the Opposition, it would have been difficult for the Chair not to select such amendments for debate. Hon. Members could have attracted enough support to ensure an unlimited debate all night for two nights if that would help.

Mr. Rooker: Will the hon. Gentleman give an example of what happens when amendments have been selected by the Chair, bearing in mind the Standing Orders under which we operate when the Government bring forward a guillotine motion? Hon. Members know that that is a waste of time. The amendments would never be put to a Division simply because of the guillotine and the Standing Orders under which we operate.

Sir Peter Emery: There is nothing to stop the Chair selecting any amendment to a guillotine motion. That has happened in the past. If tonight's opposition to the motion were as serious as it might be, it would not be like the froth on the top of a good pint of beer—nothing in substance and easy to blow away.

Mr. Heath: I have been listening with great interest to what my hon. Friend has been saying about the general attitude towards the motion. He says that hon. Members are not being serious. It is because the matter is so serious that we believe that a guillotine should not be applied. I hope that my hon. Friend will recognise that, because of the seriousness of the matter, we are not suggesting an


hour here or an extra half-hour there. The Home Secretary moved the adjournment on Thursday night—nobody else. We could have stayed here all night discussing the matter and going over further amendments, but the Government chose to move the adjournment, and that was that.
I object to being called froth on the top of the beer.

Sir Peter Emery: I understand that my right hon. Friend does not like being called froth on the top of the beer, but he will understand that, if there is agreement between the Opposition Front Bench and the Chief Whip about the time hon. Members want to adjourn, that is what happens. He knows better than most how such arrangements are made.
If there had been a desire to get the Bill through in reasonable time, the ex-Chief Whip would also know that there are methods by which that can be arranged through the usual channels. When that procedure falls down, Governments must resort to a timetable motion, and that is exactly what is happening today.
Before I vote tonight, I want an assurance from the Home Secretary. If the Procedure Committee approach is correct, and I believe that to be the case, I want an assurance from the Home Secretary that in the 16 hours that are available, every clause will be debated—I do not say every amendment—and that every major point will be pen to debate. That does not mean a prolonged debate. During the last two days of debate on the Bill, if hon. Members had restricted themselves to 10-minute speeches we would not be in this position today.

Mr. Eric S. Heffer: How long has the hon. Gentleman been speaking?

Sir Peter Emery: I have been dealing with many interruptions.
May I have an assurance from the Home Secretary that every clause of the Bill will be debated? If, within the schedule that is laid down, it becomes evident that that is not possible—

Mr. Robin Corbett: What does the hon. Gentleman mean? They will make sure it is not possible.

Sir Peter Emery: Will the hon. Gentleman listen?
If that is not possible, the House would then use the procedure in paragraph 7(2) of the motion, which would allow extra consideration of specific points. Therefore, there is the possibility of a let-out for the Government. If they are not able to deal with every clause, some extra time could be found. The House has a right to be assured that every clause will be debated before the Bill goes to the House of Lords. If I have that assurance, I have the right to ask all hon. Members who are interested in reasonable procedures in the House to support the Government in the Lobby tonight.

Mr. Robert Maclennan: The speech by the hon. Member for Honiton (Sir P. Emery) does no more than reflect that he has not been present during our debates. If he had been present, he would have understood what he plainly did not understand—that we cannot apply to a Bill of this kind, which touches upon the freedom of our citizens and the relationship between state and citizens, the kind of mechanistic framework for debate that he seeks to impose.

If that is the thinking of his Procedure Committee, it does not commend itself to the House. Indeed, it casts a somewhat sinister light upon the thinking of the Leader of the House in opening the debate and suggesting that that kind of thinking lies behind the move to guillotine the Bill.
Hon. Members have sometimes thought that there is some protection in the fact that we do not have a written constitution and that, in consequence, it is possible gradually to adapt our constitutional procedures to take account of changing political realities and perceptions. I found the Leader of the House's gradual adaptation of our parliamentary constitution extremely disturbing, as I did the idea that he, as spokesman for the Government's business management, could come to the House and say, "We are going to make guillotine motions the norm. They will become regular practice. This will be the way in which we shall proceed in the future—not the way that we proceeded in the past." That appeared to be the only real justification for this motion. The Leader of the House did not say anything about dilatoriness in our consideration of the Bill. He did not try to say that it is a simple Bill that we can understand and allow through on the nod. The motion is all about the convenience of the Executive organising legislation according to a preconceived timetable.
Perhaps when he replies to the debate, the Home Secretary will give us his view about whether that is an appropriate way for the Government to proceed because that is even more sinister than the imposition of a guillotine on the Bill. It is true that this Government have been more ready to introduce guillotines than their predecessors. They have done so 47 times during this Conservative Administration.
Like the right hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Mr. Foot), I do not take the view that because it is a constitutional Bill and one that the Government have thought fit to debate on the Floor of the House, it is inappropriate ipso facto not to have a guillotine. There are circumstances in which it is right that when a constitutional measure is before the House, the majority in the House should be allowed to decide and the efforts of the minority to frustrate the majority should not be allowed to prevail, but that is not the case that we are considering. In all our debates on this issue, the Government have shown that they are in a position to command votes and to ensure that they have a substantial majority. It is true that a sizeable minority of Conservative Members are deeply disturbed by several important principles enshrined in the Bill and by the creation of an absolute offence in clause 1.
If the hon. Member for Honiton is surprised that we took so long to debate clause 1, he should read and understand what we said because the clause is at the heart of the issue. It is the clause that makes it impossible for what has been described as a whistleblower to stop criminality in a public service. It is the clause that provides no defence on which that exposure of wrongdoing can be invoked in the courts. It is a critical proposal and it is right that it should have taken 13½ hours to consider. Incidentally, as the hon. Member for Paisley, South (Mr. Buchan) said, that clause is closely linked to several other matters and to other clauses, especially to clause 5, which were also debated, and not in a dilatory fashion.
The reality is that the Government have introduced the Bill and have said, in terms, "We are not prepared to accept amendments. We are not prepared to listen to


arguments. We will tell you something in answer to one debate and contradict ourselves half an hour later if we get it wrong." That is what the Minister of State said on the issue of judicial review.
In this Bill the Government are treating the legislative procedure with contempt. They are not interested in the arguments. They have made up their minds. Indeed, they are not even interested in the arguments of their hon. Friends. They are interested only in concealing their hon. Friends' arguments from the public. They do not wish the public to know the extent of the dismay on their Benches. That is why they are not allowing the debate and why they are curtailing it to three days.
Many serious issues remain to be decided. There is, for example, the question of prior publication, an issue that caused Lord Armstrong to trail off to Australia and to go through the courts there rubbing the noses of our lawyers in the mud to protect the Prime Minister, who had determined to squash the Spycatcher affair. That issue has not yet been debated in Committee. We must consider it properly, not because it is a matter of partisan dispute between the two sides, but because the issue whether, if a piece of official information has been published, that fact should not constitute a defence against a charge of criminal behaviour, possibly leading to two years imprisonment, is a matter of considerable importance. The idea that that should be squeezed into a debate in just one hour when probably 20 Conservative Members—never mind Opposition Members—want to contribute and have a right to be heard is preposterous.
That is not the only serious matter that has still to be considered. There is also the whole question whether information coming from the European Economic Community should be treated with a net of criminal sanctions. The fact is—no one knows this better than the Home Secretary—that there is little in our public life today that does not pass through one of the channels to or from the European Community. The Bill represents a blanket exception. It is something that we have every right to debate for more than one hour. Goodness me—we debated joining the European Community for 80 or 90 hours, as the right hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent knows.
This is a matter of grave seriousness, but the Home Secretary is scuttling it through in a way that is offensive to the parliamentary process. He is trying to treat the House as though it exists just to nod through what the Executive deem shall be.
Another issue of great importance still to be considered is the departure of the Bill from the clear recommendation of the Franks committee that the criminal law should be invoked only in cases where there is serious injury to the interests of the nation. However, that phrase does not appear in the Bill. There are various tests of harm, and fine distinctions can be drawn from different sides of the argument about the six different categories of information. We want to hear the Home Secretary justify those different categories. We want to hear why he has dispensed with the recommendation of the Franks report. We want to hear more on that subject than he told us on Second Reading or in the debate on the White Paper.

Mr. Dalyell: Did the hon. Gentleman hear the Leader of the House use the phrase "serious test of harm" in his

opening brief? When I asked why that phrase does not appear in the Bill, I was peremptorily told that he would make his own speech. However, in a formal letter the Minister of State wrote:
The object of the Bill is to ensure that in future the criminal law will penalise only those unauthorised disclosures of official information which cause a serious degree of harm".
Yet that does not appear in the Bill.

Mr. Maclennan: In his opening remarks the Leader of the House gave every indication of not having read the Bill either. His complete inability to answer any intervention of substance and his reliance on the argument about the Government's convenience suggest that he is prepared to leave these little problems to his colleague to deal with later.
The Home Secretary has most responsibility for what is happening. He seeks to portray himself—I no longer understand why—as the reasonable man, l'homme moyen sensuel. His behaviour with legislation this Session suggests that he is far from being the reasonable man. He is the creature of a Prime Minister who has effectively dispensed with collective Cabinet decision-making. The only possible justification for his attitude and approach, not only to the content of the Bill but to the way in which it is being handled, must be the self-justification, "If I were not here, there would be somebody worse doing the job." I am not sure whether I would not almost prefer someone else, the colour of whose eyes one could see and whose prejudices were less masked by his behaviour. I am rather tired of seeking to defend the Home Secretary from his colleagues, of trying to draw distinctions between him and his colleagues and of making excuses for the behaviour that so ill becomes him.
The Bill merits consideration for as long as the House thinks that it merits consideration. It seems to be in violation of our international treaty obligations under the European convention on human rights. It seems probable that we shall be back before the European Court of Human Rights for infringing article 10's guarantee of freedom of information. It is extremely probable that the Bill will not do what the Government hope that it will do, which is to silence the whistleblowers. Those whistle-blowers are usually men and women who are concerned about the public interest and will not be silenced by threats of this sort.
The Bill has had a rapid passage to the present position. It has had 13½ hours of debate on a serious group of amendments. I do not believe that it would take long to debate it because what has been discussed is undoubtedly the most important part. The important matters still to come would take only time which the Government could and should afford.
The Government have become contemptuous of free speech. That is implicit and almost explicit in the Bill. They are contemptuous of parliamentary and public opinion, and they are governing ever more as though Parliament does not matter. That is what is wrong with the guillotine motion.

Several Hon. Members: rose—

Madame Deputy Speaker (Miss Betty Boothroyd): Order. Several hon. Members wish to take part in this debate. I appeal to hon. Members to impose a personal timetable on their speeches so that I may call all those seeking to speak.

Mr. Julian Amery: I shall come down from the eloquent diatribe we have just heard to submit two practical reasons why the guillotine is premature. The first is that the Bill may not prove to be the same Bill as the one that we passed on Second Reading. The second is that I am not sure that the House is yet aware of some of the Bill's implications for the rights and freedoms of hon. Members. Let me substantiate those points.
On Second Reading I ventured to ask about the conditions on which members or former members of the secret services could be authorised to publish their memoirs. I do not want to discuss the merits: that would be out of place in this debate. I suggested several criteria which I thought the Government might apply and which were rather more liberal than the obligation of lifelong confidentiality which they had originally suggested. When the debate came to a close and my hon. Friend the Minister of State replied, he gave me in great detail the assurances which I sought.
It was an exhilarating experience. In nearly 40 years in the House of Commons, I had never had the satisfaction of hearing a Minister accept almost everything that I had advanced earlier in the debate. I had a feeling of self-satisfaction at my persuasive powers and a genuine appreciation of the understanding which the Minister had shown. I went cheerfully into the Lobby and voted in support of Second Reading. There I was greeted by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and my hon. Friend the Minister who said, "If any points remain unanswered, please write to us." There were one or two, so afterwards I wrote to them and I received in reply a letter from my right hon. Friend which, as I understand it, repudiates almost wholly the assurances that I had received.
If the House will allow me, I should like to read out the relevant passages. The Minister in his reply said:
the sole criterion for authorising publication is whether publication of a particular piece of information will jeopardise national security directly or indirectly. It is a judgment about considerations which are relevant today, not about past history or former embarrassments.
If a point of difficulty were to be identified it might still be possible through discussion to agree with the author a change in the text to overcome the problem.
A little later he added:
If the problem is larger than just a few minor textual changes or if agreement cannot be reached, sometimes authorisation will not be given."—[Official Report, 21 December 1988; Vol. 144 c. 538.]
A few days later, the letter from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State stated:
I must emphasise that authorisation to members or former members in respect of disclosures of information about their work will be rare and given only in exceptional circumstances.
There is no easy way of reconciling those two statements. I refuse to believe that my hon. Friend the Minister said what he did to lure me into the Division Lobby. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh, no."] I reject that wholeheartedly. Nor do I believe that he spoke beyond his brief, as sometimes happens with a junior Minister. I am satisfied that he and the Secretary of State were in agreement about what he said to me in his reply. Perhaps in the cold light of dawn they reflected that they had gone

too far. Or perhaps they consulted a higher authority—though for the senior Secretary of State, there are not many higher authorities.
I can only conclude that, on reflection and after consultation, they decided that they would like to go back on what they had said. At the minimum, that shows some confusion in Government thinking about the Bill, and that alone would justify giving a little more time for them to think it out and perhaps to take into consideration the views of the House of Commons.
But I would go a little further than that. I still hope that the Secretary of State, on further reflection, will allow the assurances given by the Minister of State to stand. After all, they are engraved in the tablets of Hansard for all to see. That is the Government's position. That is the basis of the Bill. But if my right hon. Friend is determined, as his letter suggests, to go back on what the Minister of State said, he will have to explain himself to the House, and it will not be easy. I am sure that, if he decides to repudiate my hon. Friend, he will have to admit that he, however involuntarily, had misled the House. If he does that, we shall surely be entitled to a full day's debate on the issue, on which some of us were persuaded to support the Second Reading, and to have the matter clarified. We must be given a second chance to persuade the Government to do what I believe is the right thing.

Mr. Budgen: Has my right hon. Friend noticed the way in which the courts have been extending their power, through the mechanism of judicial review, and the way in which they are increasingly examining the way in which the legislation was passed? If there is a plain error on the record in Hansard, and it is not cleared up, is there not a serious risk that the legislation will be subject to frequent judicial reviews? Would it not be much better if we spent a little more time and clarified the muddles into which Ministers, for all their grandeur—they are human and fallible—may enter? It would be much better if we spent more time on the Bill now and stopped any future litigation.

Mr. Amery: I am grateful for my hon. Friend's endorsement of my views and for his further arguments in support of them.
I do not wish to over-stress the importance of the point, because I doubt whether 60 people out of nearly 60 million of Her Majesty's subjects would wish to write their memoirs on such matters. But this is what set the Peter Wright case and its subsequent folly on its way, and made a laughing stock of the Government at home and abroad.

Mr. Aitken: The House can see that the Minister of State is in his place. Would it not be appropriate for some comment to be made about this extraordinary repudiation or discrepancy? We cannot leave the matter in this embarrassing state of limbo.

Mr. Amery: I take my hon. Friend's point. Perhaps in the reply to the debate we shall have some clarification. would not wish to embarrass either my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State or my hon. Friend the Minister of State by asking for an immediate comment on the rather awkward corner in which they find themselves.
My second point relates to the defence of public interest, on which we had an extremely interesting debate. Again, I do not wish to go into the merits of the matter, which would be inappropriate in this debate, but there was


an error which was frequently repeated. Some hon. Members drew attention to the information that had been given to Sir Winston Churchill between the wars. They were in error because that information was authorised, in the case of Wigram and of Desmond Morton. But there has been a convention that officials or others who speak to Privy Councillors should not be considered guilty of indiscretion.
It occurred to me to try to form a bridge between my right hon. Friend and his opponents on the defence of public interest by suggesting that it would be within the scope of the Bill if someone who wanted to make a protest, instead of speaking to the newspapers, asked his Member of Parliament to put him in touch with a Privy Councillor so that he could make his point. I do not wish to go into the merits of that line of approach, but my inquiries suggested that there was some doubt as to whether communication of such matters to Members of Parliament would be privileged, or even whether the disclosure by Members of Parliament of that information would be privileged.
My anxieties on that score were deepened when I investigated Hansard and found an exchange between the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) and my hon. Friend the Minister of State. The right hon. Gentleman said:
If a member of the security services tells me that my telephone is being tapped without warrant and therefore illegally or that my house has been burgled without warrant and therefore illegally, is it or is it not a criminal offence for me to make that information public?
My hon. Friend replied.
It would be a criminal offence for the right hon. Gentleman to make that public, and quite rightly so because he has an avenue of redress. He can go to the tribunal set up under the Security Service Bill."—[Official Report, 25 January 1989; Vol. 145, c. 1051]
The waters surrounding privilege are very deep, but the Minister of State's comments seem to fly in the face of the decision taken in the Duncan Sandys case and the much more recent opinion offered by the Committee of Privileges in the Zircon case. The Strauss case may put forward arguments the other way. We wish to know how the Government interpret the Bill. Will our correspondence be privileged? Will anything that we may say in the House be privileged? It would help if we could be told that today. If we cannot be given that assurance, would it be appropriate to move a motion asking that the Committee stage and further proceedings be postponed until we have secured the opinion of the Committee of Privileges?
I want to make my position clear. I am no crusader for open government. I do not wish to have the arrangements that pertain in the United States. Executive secrets must be kept. I do not want publication without authorisation, provided that authorisation is not unreasonably withheld. I am not very strong on the defence of public interest, subject to the right of an individual to raise his grievance through his Member of Parliament.
All I have been begging my right hon. and hon. Friend is not to screw the lid down too tight. They should not make an ass of the very law that they are trying to put forward. The Wright case should have taught us all a lesson. All I ask is that the Government should give the House and themselves a bit more time to consider the legislation before us.
It is, I fear, untrue that Doctor Guillotin ended his life on the machine which he had invented, but I would not like to see my right hon. and hon. Friends guillotining themselves in the course of these proceedings.

Mr. Tam Dalyell: I shall follow a chain of thought which was initiated by my right hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent (Mr. Foot), when he asked about the position of the Leader of the House. I would like—I hope, politely—to ask the Leader of the House what he considers is his job in these situations. My right hon. Friend, as Leader of the House, was present almost throughout the controversial legislation—in which he may not have taken a leading part—during the Labour Government. It was the same with Dick Crossman and lain Macleod, my first Leader of the House.
I hope that the House will forgive me if I say that, had lain Macleod been the Leader of the House, the junior Minister at the Home Office would have been up at the Dispatch Box within 48 hours explaining what he did mean, because the Leader of the House would have required him to do so. I should have thought that—whereas one must not be absurd and say that the Leader of the House should be a universal expert on the most minor legislation—on major Bills such as as this, one really could expect the Leader of the House to be familiar with the Government's legislation, because, presumably, he is the Chairman of the Legislation Committee.

Mr. Winnick: Does my hon. Friend agree that the previous Leader of the House, the right hon. Member for Shropshire, North (Mr. Biffen), was dismissed because he showed some independence? Although, of course, he was always loyal in arguing the Government's case as a Cabinet Minister, he had a loyalty to the House. I suppose it was for that very reason that he was dismissed from office.

Mr. Dalyell: I certainly accept that. I also happen to believe that the right hon. Member for Shropshire, North (Mr. Biffen) might well have required a statement on judicial review and exactly what was involved, which was the point that the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Budgen) sharply raised. I believe that there would have been some explanation forthcoming. Hitherto we have had none.
Time is limited and I would just like to draw attention to yet another fundamental muddle over the concept of harm tests which juries will be asked to consider under the Official Secrets act when it becomes law. The Minister of State at the Home Office told me in a letter:
Your fourteenth Question"—
posed during the Second Reading debate—
is based on the assumption that the object of the Bill is to stop leaks. The object of the Bill is to ensure that in future the criminal law will penalise only those unauthorised disclosures of official information which cause a serious degree of harm to the public interest, and that such disclosure will only be an offence if the discloser has good reason to know that his disclosure was likely to cause specified harm. As a result of the Bill the unauthorised disclosure of the great majority of official information will no longer be a criminal offence.
That was written in a long and serious letter. However, Ministers have consistently turned down requests from any side of the House—mostly their side—for the "serious


injury" test, which was proposed by Lord Franks, by my right hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Leeds, South (Mr. Rees) and their colleagues back in 1972.
Now, in its draft form, the Bill says that leaks of information relating to security and intelligence matters have to be "damaging" for a prosecution to succeed. The harm test for international relations leaks is that they are required to "jeopardise" United Kingdom interests abroad. The prosecution will have to prove that defence leaks "prejudice" the capability of the armed forces. Admittedly, the Home Secretary has in the past few weeks proposed that the harm test for defence leaks should be raised to "damage". However, even so, the test falls a long way short of "serious" harm or injury, or "serious degree of harm to the public interest", which were the words used by the Minister of State in his letter to me. As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mr. Corbett) said that is surely the situation.
It is all very well for Home Office Ministers to use the phrase "serious degree of harm to the public interest" in letters, but the courts will look at what is in the Bill. On Friday night, 10 February, in a very interesting programme on Channel 4, Lord Griffiths of Gouilon, chairman of the Security Commission and an Appeal Court judge, said that the judges do not, and should not, read Hansard to find out what Parliament meant and that Lord Taylor and Sir Gordon Slynn and the other judges accepted that. In fact we all know that to be true. The fact is that no serious harm test appears anywhere in the Bill. Either the Minister of State's letter must be amended by parliamentary statement or the Bill must be changed. If Ministers were to act quickly, it might be less acceptable for the guillotine procedure to be introduced. Given their record, however, there is no feeling that Ministers will quickly accept error.
There is no serious definition of "international organisation." That term is extremely wide. What about all the EEC examples? Is the EEC's research into salmonella to come within all this? Surely we are entitled to know about EEC documents, regulations and research. With such little time available to us, I leave the point there.
Then there is the power to designate. We could have a great deal of argument with any Secretary of State about that. On what grounds should there be no appeal? As you have appealed for short speeches, Madame Deputy Speaker, I shall move on.
It is being widely said in Whitehall that the Government will try to carry out their wishes by bypassing the House and operating through the Civil Service discipline regulations. I am told that the Government need not come to the House to do that. It is said that the Government, through the regulations, will say that those who have leaked documents will lose their pension rights. Is there any talk in the Home Office, or in any other Department, about punishing Civil Service leakers by the withdrawal of pension rights? As you have appealed for short speeches, Madam Deputy Speaker, I shall resume my place.

Mr. Norman Tebbit: It is some time since I have spoken from the Back Benches on a guillotine motion. The debates do not change, do they? They are always the same. They are always ritualistic. The House

almost always shows itself at its worst on these occasions, with some extremely pompous speeches being made on the issue.

Mr. Richard Shepherd: Ritualistic?

Mr. Tebbit: I have been in the House a little longer than my hon. Friend.

Mr. Shepherd: Not to debate this subject.

Mr. Tebbit: I am referring to debates on timetable motions, not to general debates on the Bills. If my hon. Friend would listen, he would understand that.
These debates are ritualistic, and this one is as ritualistic as any of them. The Opposition and others who are opposed to the particular measure that is passing through the House always claim that there has been insufficient time to discuss the Bill, however much time there has been to do so. My hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) would know that if he could remember the passage through the House of Bills such as the Housing Finance Bill, as it then was, in 1972.
It is interesting that once we have a timetable motion—
this is so on almost every occasion—those who are opposed to the Bill in question tend to speak less and less and to appear on fewer and fewer occasions. I can recollect many instances when once the timetable motion has been agreed to, following all the ritualistic objections, it has been difficult for Opposition to keep debates going. Dinner breaks in Committee have become longer and longer and the rising hour has become earlier and earlier.
What I say is particularly true of Bills that are considered in Standing Committee. I know that things are different when Bills are considered in Committee on the Floor of the House. The Opposition and others who want to seek concessions feel that they have even more ability on the Floor of the House to delay the Government's legislative programme by procrastination, if nothing more. The Government dissidents see the prospect of better leverage and better prospects of obtaining concessions to meet their point of view. There is nothing wrong with that. Nor is there anything wrong with the Government taking the view that they will not make concessions unless they think that it is right to do so, and that they want to get the business through the House. I say to some of my hon. Friends, as well as to Opposition Members, that it is conceivable that they could be mistaken and that Ministers could be right. I beg them to take that into account.
There is only a limited amount that can be said on any Bill and the major difference—

Mr. Dykes: Democracy is irritating, is it not?

Mr. Tebbit: My hon. Friend says that democracy is irritating. He knows that that is an extremely stupid and offensive remark. He does not like me saying something with which he disagrees. I fancy that that is the remark of someone who is slightly intolerant.
The great difference between Bills taken in Committee on the Floor of the House and those considered upstairs is that Privy Councillors can speak here, but not upstairs. Privy Councillors tend to take up a lot of time. They cannot speak upstairs because they are not Members of Standing Committees.
It is a great privilege, but my goodness, I sometimes wish that Privy Councillors would not be quite so keen to


speak in Committees of the whole House. We are not in Committee on a Bill now. This is a timetable motion and that is what I am speaking about.
In speaking to the timetable motion, my remarks differ from many that we have heard today. At times it would have been possible to imagine that this was a Second Reading debate. The hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson) made a Second Reading speech, and a third-rate one at that.
I disagree with my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary about some aspects of the Bill. As he is aware, I believe that clause 2 is lamentably weak and should be strengthened. I shall press that view on him at some stage, but I shall do so briefly and concisely. I suspect that he will advance his reasons to the contrary.
There has been some discussion this evening about precedents for timetable motions. Everyone who brings forward a timetable motion has a perfect reason for it. My right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath) made a speech which would have stuck in his throat if he had made it between 1955 and 1959 or between 1970 and 1974. He obviously takes some pride in the fact that he did not use a timetable motion on his Industrial Relations Bill in 1971 whereas I had to ask for a timetable motion on my Employment Bill in 1982. Of course there was another difference between the two, but it would be slightly impolite to my right hon. Friend, and perhaps a little boastful on my part, to mention it.
Every debate on every Bill could be extended almost interminably. However, every debate on every Bill comes to an end sooner or later. The only question is, should it be sooner or later? The question that we have to ask ourselves tonight on this motion is whether this is the time to take the decision and whether another 16 or 17 hours of debate is sufficient. I am prepared to take that decision tonight. I am perfectly prepared to support my right hon. and hon. Friends in saying that another 17 hours of discussion should be ample for this Bill.

Mr. Norman Buchan: I am not sure whether I am happy to follow the right hon. Member for Chingford (Mr. Tebbit). I have always thought that he was one of the most unpleasant and objectionable Members of this House.

Mr. Winnick: And odious and poisonous.

Mr. Buchan: Indeed, odious and poisonous; like a polecat, he never changes his spots.
The right hon. Member for Chingford wants clause 2 to be strengthened. I do not know what he wants to happen, whether he wants people to be shot, but from his tone I am glad that he is no longer a Minister. This Government are bad enough without him.
We know why the motion is before us tonight. It is not because time has been wasted. If the right hon. Member—what a description—for Chingford had been present, he would have known that no time has been wasted and that we were dealing seriously with combinations of amendments. We were not restricting ourselves to clause 1 alone. We were extending debate on important issue after important issue in the Bill.
The right hon. Member for Chingford does not even seem to understand the Bill's importance, especially when he speaks so casually about clause 2. The Official Secrets Bill follows the Security Service Bill, when the Government also ensured that not a single amendment could be taken, so that matters could not be further discussed on Report. And after only 13 hours of debate on the Official Secrets Bill, the Government are introducing a guillotine.
The truth is that the Bill before the House is obnoxious. It is being guillotined because the country, and the press especially, are growing increasingly aware of how bad it is. That is the same reason why the Government ensured that there will be no Report stage for the Security Service Bill. They got away with it on that occasion, but it caused so much annoyance that the Government were less sure that they could do so again in respect of the Official Secrets Bill. Consequently, they have truncated debate. Now that people are beginning to understand the Bill's implications for our freedom and liberty, the Government are introducing the guillotine.
There is another, allied, reason for the Government's action. The people who are most worried about the Official Secrets Bill, and who honourably and openly express their concern, are the Government's own right hon. and hon. Members. Every time that more Tories listen to the debate, the more they oppose the Bill. Conservative Members listening to the debate on the Bill for the first time were later to be found in the Lobby, voting against it. In only a short period, the Government would have found themselves with neither a majority of the House, nor of Conservative Members in favour of the Bill.

Mr. Rooker: As further proof of my hon. Friend's point, and leaving aside the extra two days that the Government are making available, the fact that, this week, on consecutive days, the Government are not allowing time for mature consideration of the Bill adds further weight to the argument that they never intended to allow debate on the Bill. That illustrates, as my hon. Friend points out, the bad faith with which Members on the Government Front Bench have approached the passage of the Bill, right from its Second Reading.

Mr. Buchan: What has been an extraordinary experience has been the sheer lack of understanding by Members of the Government Front Bench of their own Bill. We require time to debate the Bill because on every single point, Ministers were getting it wrong. The more they spoke about the Bill, the more contradictions we heard. We have heard another terrifying contradiction tonight. I refer to the correspondence between the Home Office and right hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Mr. Amery). No answer has yet been given. The Home Secretary says that something is white, but then the right hon. Gentleman receives a letter from the Home Office saying that it is black. The Government say, "We will resolve that difficulty when we wind up the debate."
It is an appalling Bill, and for the right hon. Member for Chingford to enter the Chamber for the first time and try to defend it, and to say that it should be made stronger, is also appalling. On both Committee days, the Government moved the adjournment, which is also extraordinary. After only two days of single debates, the Government moved the adjournment. I should like to know the last occasion on which adjournment in respect of


a guillotined Bill was moved by the Government. Those of us who were prepared to debate the Bill all night were unable to do so, because on at least two occasions the Government prevented discussion. They then introduced the guillotine, on the ground that there had been sufficient discussion. It was the Government who destroyed earlier opportunities for debate.
There is no excuse for the Bill, and I do not believe that the Government themselves understand it. The Government have shown their ignorance of several issues already raised this evening. Another is the question of harm. There is nothing in the Bill to say that harm must be shown, and neither has it been defined in relation to different clauses of the Bill. I shall give another example that requires investigation. I did not put down an amendment on this point, because, until last week, I did not expect the current state of affairs to be thrown upon us. Not only is the subject of harm not mentioned, but the Government do not define examples.
Clause 2 relates to defence and raises an issue that I mentioned mildly last week. There has been no answer, no comment and no public statement on the issue, which related to what the word "harm" referred to. If there is a radiation leak from a nuclear base on the Clyde which is not disclosed by the authorities, but is disclosed by an honest whistleblower who is concerned that health precautions should be taken, the Government will claim that, in the clause, "harm" is the harm done to our defence establishments by the knowledge of its inadequacies and the truth of its function. However, we would be concerned about the harm to the health of the people in that district which would not he a defence. The whistleblower would automatically he guilty, although the harm would have been done to the health of the people nearby.
It is not right for that sort of problem to be left in the air without proper time for discussion—or even time to let the poor Minister of State, who has been thrown into the debate on this Bill, receive some answers from the Box.
I do not want to speak for too long, because many Conservative Members, as well as Opposition Members, wish to speak, but I am horrified by the decision. I have been a Member of the House for more than 20 years, and I know that not all guillotines are the same. I have never known a guillotine to be introduced with such speed after adjournments have been moved time after time by the Government; the Government have shown their own inadequacies and failed to answer questions; and the more hon. Members have listened, the more opposition has built up against the Bill. The present guillotine is unique.
The Bill is concerned with the freedoms and liberties of the people of this country. It involves their most precious freedom, that of the word and the honesty of speech—along with other Bills that truncate the same freedoms of speech in the media. The Home Secretary is a dab hand at cutting and savaging the BBC. People whose task it should be to expose the iniquities of executives and Governments, have been silenced. The Bill is in the interests of the Executive, not of Parliament or the people of this country. It preserves the secrecies of a Government who not only have too large a majority for anybody's sake, but have been in government too long for any good that they have done. They have substituted for the sovereignty of Parliament the sovereignty of the Executive.
We still need to know who will have the authority if the Home Secretary gets it wrong and backs up the Minister of State when he gets it wrong. Whose decision will be

superimposed? Surely only that of No. 10, and perhaps Bernard Ingham's now that he has been relatively ennobled. That is frightening. The motion should be thrown out with contempt.

Mr. Terence Higgins: I have lost count of how many guillotine motions I have voted against when in opposition and how many I have voted for when in government. I have never previously had the opportunity or occasion to speak in such a debate, although I was recently reminded that I was a member of a Government who introduced a guillotine motion before the Committee had even begun to consider the Counter-Inflation (Temporary Provisions) Bill.
The crucial point about that measure was that it dealt with a matter of extreme urgency. I greatly regretted the situation that gave rise to it and I am glad that the policies of the present Government, under the leadership of the Prime Minister, have not resulted in any such urgent action on economic matters. However, that was an urgent matter, and the measure was only temporary in that it carried out a proposal that was to last for 90 days. That was in marked contrast with the Bill that we are considering this evening.
It is difficult to envisage a Bill less urgent than this Bill. We have been waiting and waiting for such a measure to come forward, and we have been told that the Home Secretary has spent many weeks, months and even years considering what should be in it. Yet, when the House of Commons is to consider what ought to be in the Bill, arid its detailed proposals, we are told that it must be rushed through on a guillotine. The measure to which I referred a moment ago lasted merely 90 days, but in this Bill we are probably legislating for a generation or more. Therefore, not to give the House adequate time to consider the measure at this stage seems a serious mistake.
As right hon. and hon. Members have pointed out, in no sense has there been a filibuster in our debates so far. Thre has been no tendency for proceedings to be prolonged unduly by either side of the House. On the contrary, we have had a major debate on major issues and on the whole everyone has made thoughtful, cogent and reasonably short speeches. So the usual argument for a guillotine, which is that a measure is being obstructed unreasonably, most certainly does not apply.
The importance of the measure is illustrated by the fact that is being debated on the Floor of the House. We have a duty to examine the detailed proposals in the Bill. I do not accept the point made by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, that we have already had a day to discuss the White Paper and a day on Second Reading. This is our chance to examine the Bill in detail. Our progress so far has made it absolutely clear that there is considerable uncertainty about the detail of the Bill.
Today, we have all referred constantly to the problem of judicial review. It was very clear that the Government and Ministers were not clear about the true position. Therefore, the House has a duty to examine in detail what is proposed. My right hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Mr. Amery) pointed out the real confusion which arose between Second Reading and the letter which he received. That problem should he debated on amendment or on a clause stand part debate. However, we all know that the real trouble with the guillotine is that


it is likely that some amendments will not be debated because the chopper will fall. The same applies to clause stand part debates. We shall probably not have adequate time to discuss many points that require debate.
My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary very kindly has written to me on a couple of points about which I expressed concern to my hon. Friend the Minister of State. That is all very well, but a letter from the Minister spelling something out is not the same as the scrutiny which takes place in the House and the way in which aspects of the Bill may be revealed to Ministers. I recall that, however much time my officials and I had devoted to trying to get the drafting right on a Finance Bill, if the Opposition of which ever party were doing their job, suddenly one would see a horrible flaw in the legislation which one had not observed previously—because the House of Commons was doing its duty and looking in detail at specific proposals.
Therefore I deeply regret the fact that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House has proposed this motion this evening. Unlike my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford (Mr. Tebbit), I do not agree that it is all a ritual. I have a strong feeling that there is real and profound concern on both sides of the House that the measure is not being dealt with in the way in which the House of Commons should deal with it. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House knows that I have profound respect for him and for the way in which he carries out his duties. I believe that the task of the Leader of the House is immensely difficult in defending the interests of Back Benchers while representing to the House the views of the Government, but I have to say that the guillotine on this particular Bill is premature, and it is wrong that the House should agree to it.

Mr. Roy Hattersley: This is the first time during almost 25 years in the House that I have taken part in a timetable motion debate, but I have listened to a great many. Working on that experience, I do not propose to make any of the extravagant claims which often characterise these debates, but some of the facts are beyond dispute.
The first is that this guillotine has no friends except the Government and their acolytes. The Times condemned it. The Daily Telegraph condemned it. If even The Times and The Daily Telegraph in their present form cannot bring themselves to support the Government, who in heaven's name can? [HoN. MEMBERS: "The Sun."] I propose to deal later with sycophants who were wheeled in solely to support the Bill.
The second fact has been established on both sides of the House. The House accepts that nothing in the two days of Committee justifies a guillotine now. It would be wrong to say that absolutely no time was wasted. Time was wasted by the Minister of State, who could not, or would not, give answers to questions. Fearing that we should have a debate such as this, I took the precaution, two weeks ago, of writing to the Secretary of State saying that we would make speedier progress if his junior Minister was better briefed in future.
Time was also wasted by the Government when, late on each of the two sitting nights, they discovered that no hon. Member had supported the Government, so they

persuaded sycophants to come in and make brief, supportive but ill-informed speeches from the Back Benches. Apart from those two examples, time has been used as sensibly as it is possible to use it in the House.
I want to say something about that to the hon. Member for Honiton (Sir P. Emery), who is not here and is therefore unable to receive my apology directly. Until this evening, I believed that he was the Chairman of the Select Committee on Procedure. I realise now that I must have been wrong to make such an assumption, for he misunderstood entirely the nature of debates in Committee stages. He talked to the House as if the debate so far concluded were concerned exclusively with the early lines of clause 1.
The debate so far concluded has been concerned with fundamental principles which underlie clause after clause. That is why many of the amendments were debated but not voted on immediately after the debate was finished. The idea that the House has spent 13 hours on two lines is palpable nonsense. It has spent two days' debating time on two fundamental principles. If the hon. Member for Honiton had understood either the Bill or the principles which govern the behaviour of a Committee stage conducted on the Floor of the House, he would not have made the gross error that he made this evening.
The hon. Gentleman also said that there had always been conversations and discussions between the two sides. I confess freely that I had conversations with the Home Secretary and, insofar as it is possible to have a conversation with the Government Chief Whip, a conversation with him. The message I conveyed, which I have no doubt was the right message to convey, was that the Bill was not suitable for a carve-up between the Opposition Front Bench and the Government. It is a matter on which the House takes a view. It is a matter on which Tory Back Benchers take a view. It would have been an impertinence—indeed, it would have been an impossibility—for us to say that we would carry with us, on specific dates, Members on both sides of the House who have independent positions and rightly want to express their opinions as free and independent Members of the House of Commons.
When I had conversations with the Home Secretary and what passes for conversation with the Government Chief Whip, I came, as early as the first evening of our consideration, to a clear conclusion—that the Government were determined to guillotine the Bill from the moment it was published. There has never been any intention to have full and free debate on it. That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the way in which the debate has proceeded.
The debate proceeded, on the first day, on the fundamental question of lifetime secrecy. It is perfectly true that I then said to the Home Secretary that it would be intolerable for us to start late at night on the crucial question of a public interest defence. But it would have been possible to have a procedural motion to allow us to do other things at that time.
On the second day, knowing that the Home Secretary is not always quite as arcadian and palladian and superior when he is debating as when he is speaking to groups of Conservatives outside, and knowing that he would take advantage of any suggestion that we were not prepared to go on, I went out of my way to put on record in Hansard our willingness to continue to debate, so that there should be no suggestion that the Opposition wanted to bring


discussion to a speedy conclusion. But a fortnight ago the Home Secretary insisted that the debate should be concluded at what, for the House of Commons, was a comparatively early hour, confirming my view that from the beginning the Government have intended to guillotine this Bill.
I want to say to the hon. Member for Honiton that I understand—no one wants to be foolish about this—that Governments sometimes need to guillotine debates in order to get their business through. It is the Government's right—perhaps it is their duty—to get their business through. But there was no question of this Bill not passing into law. This guillotine is proposed not in order that the Bill shall proceed with good order and discipline, but in order that it shall proceed with the minimum of public debate.
If we had any doubts as to the need for public debate, and the consequences for the Government of public debate and their reasons for wanting to curtail public debate, we would need to do no more than look at the first two days. It was through debate in this House that we learned that, if a man's house is illegally burgled by the security services, or if a woman has her telephone illegally tapped by the security services, and if he or she is told about it by a member of the security services, it is a criminal offence to reveal that illegality—a criminal offence carrying a prison sentence.
It is clearly not in the interests of the Home Secretary, who poses as a reformer, that such facts should be prised out during the debate. It was only through the debate in this House that we discovered that the illegality I have just described could not be spoken of to the victim's laywer without the victim being subject to prosecution and possible prison sentence. Indeed, it was only through the debate that the Minister of State learned that that was the case, for initially he gave a categorically inaccurate answer, which we are still waiting for him to correct.
Again, it is not in the Government's interests, and not in the interests of a Home Secretary who, as recently as 72 hours ago, announced that he was the natural heir to Mr. R. A. Butler, that the nature of his proposals should see the light of day in the way that the debate makes possible.
Let me give another example of how the Home Secretary's behaviour shows why he and his colleagues want this debate to be curtailed. Speaking in Cambridge on Friday evening, he announced—if The Daily Telegraph is to be believed—that if the debate last week had resulted in a public interest defence being included in the Bill, that would have provided a defence for any member of the security services who had wanted to reveal the battle plan of the British Army of the Rhine. If the Home Secretary had said that in the House of Commons, he would have been laughed out of the Chamber, because that was given in the debate as exactly the sort of episode that could not be cited in a public interest defence. The Home Secretary finds it better to discuss these matters in front of the gullible Conservatives of Cambridge than in front of the House of Commons, where they should be debated. That is the basic reason and intention of this debate.
Yet the issues we ought to be discussing here are issues that go to the heart of the freedoms which this society should enjoy and which affect a crucial parliamentary issue—the balance of power between the courts, the Government and individuals. This Bill takes to the Government power that should reside in the courts and, as a result, it reduces the liberty—I put it not higher than this

—of a substantial part of our population. The guillotine was intended to obscure the revelation of that sort of fact, and it is because of the desire to muddy the waters, not only that the guillotine is introduced at all, but that the concluding days of the Committee stage are to be rushed through on consecutive sitting days in the wholly inadequate circumstances of a Thursday and Wednesday afternoon.
There is a second reason for the introduction of the guillotine. In my view, its introduction is all the more deplorable when one considers the issues that are yet to be debated. During the next two days we are to discuss whether it is reasonable to suppress information that has already been published abroad. Many of us will want to argue that the suppression of information that is available in other countries has nothing to do with security but everything to do with Government management.
To say that the British people cannot know what is already known in the Kremlin is not something that concerns the safety of the realm. It concerns the Government's convenience. No wonder that the Government do not want the issue to be debated at length.
During the next two days we shall discuss whether information from abroad is to be suppressed simply because it comes from abroad and whether the tests of harm—about which the Home Secretary speaks so eloquently, and no doubt he will do so again—are adequate tests to protect the man or woman who feels entitled to reveal trivial or unconsequential matters or matters that the Home Secretary should not himself have the power to proscribe.
Because of the nature of the debate, it is all the more important that the House of Commons should be allowed to continue the debate, as the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr. Heath) said, for as long as the House of Commons wishes and for as long as it continues to debate these matters in a responsible and sensible fashion. I fear, however, that the nature of the debate was only one of the reasons that prompted the Government to introduce the guillotine.
The second reason is more alarming than the first. It is the Government's impatience with the proper processes of democracy. The Prime Minister says openly—I think that she was talking about her Cabinet colleagues, but I have no doubt that she holds the House of Commons in equal contempt—that she has no time to waste on argument. Very often, democracy depends on argument continuing unchecked. To the Prime Minister, criticism is something to be suppressed. Opposition is something to be bullied or bought off.
It is the duty of a democratic Government and of a democratic Prime Minister to facilitate discussion. Were the Home Secretary to allow it, the Bill that emerged would be a great deal more satisfactory than the one we are now debating, and his reputation would be a great deal more secure than it will be if he pushes through an instrument that, time after time, will be demonstrated to be inadequate for the purposes that he claims it will serve—those purposes being an attempt to safeguard that information which it is necessary to hold secret and, on the other hand, to allow freely the exposition of facts which, if they are published, do no harm to the national interest.
The Home Secretary, however, who must know these things—or who knew them once and who once would have resented and resisted the Prime Minister's autocracy and her determination to have measures passed by Parliament


without adequate discussion—is now prepared to act as her lapdog. I suspect that those who sit on the Benches behind the Home Secretary will provide sufficient votes for the guillotine motion to be passed. I suspect, too, that having done so they will provide sufficient votes on Wednesday and Thursday to ensure that the Bill, in more or less its present form, becomes law.
Many hon. Members—I see some of them in their places now—will be persuaded to speak at such length that the Minister of State will never be able to correct himself about the position and duties of lawyers as concern their clients, and he will never be able to get straight the issue with which he so confused the hon. Member for Hove (Mr. Sainsbury). The Home Secretary will make little, darting speeches that assert his good intentions without demonstrating them with reference to the Bill.
There will be two days of debate during which the Home Secretary will play the worst trick of all. He will describe the Bill not by referring to its clauses but by referring to the Home Office handouts which, as we know, have constantly given a false impression of what the Bill contains. I suspect that the Bill will pass into law, thanks to the supine Members who sit on the Back Benches on the other side of the House, but when it is passed into law it wil be a bad day for democracy and a contemptible day for Parliament.

The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Douglas Hurd): I agree with this much of what the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) said—that the Bill deals basically with the relationship between the courts, Parliament, Government and the individual.
The debate has turned, as it should, on two basic points. The first is whether there should be a timetable motion for the Bill and, and if so, whether the timetable proposed is a reasonable one. The second is whether, as the Opposition argue, this motion fits into a pattern of Government unreasonableness and arbitrariness on the subject. I shall deal with both those points.
The ground on the first point was thoroughly covered by my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House. The Bill is important and goes to the heart of the functioning of Government. With 16 clauses, it is a relatively short Bill. It severely reduces the present scope of the criminal law and within the information still to be protected by the criminal law, it ties down the prosecution, for the first time, with a number of specific tests of harm. That is a fair description of the Bill and we decided—and the whole House agreed—that the Committee stage should be held on the Floor of the House.
I listened carefully, as did the House, to my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup, (Mr. Heath) and the right hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Mr. Foot). The right hon. Gentleman, like others, made a basically defensive speech about his own past and his ingenious attempt to distinguish between his passionate love affair with the guillotine, which I remember well, and my right hon. Friend's motion. He did not persuade any hon. Member—perhaps not even himself.
It is not my place to attack my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup for authoritarian

tendencies, and I do not know what my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Mr. Budgen) or my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford (Mr. Tebbit) were referring to in that respect. I would defend him on the episodes mentioned, but although I listened carefully to the case against timetabling every Bill and agree with it, I do not think that my right hon. Friend succeeded in making the case that this Bill should not be timetabled at all.
The right hon. Member for Sparkbrook touched on this point just now. We have had two days of debate, yet we are not within clear sight of the end of clause 1. I am not complaining about that or making accusations of filibustering, any more than my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House did. However, after long and unrestricted debate, the Committee has come to a conclusion on two important matters. The first is whether there should be a special offence applying to members and former members of the intelligence and security services and others notified because of their close connection with that work. The second is whether, although there is no general right of prosecution on the ground of public interest, there should be such a right for the defence. Those were the matters discussed and dealt with in Committee.
The pace has been slow and, as the right hon. Member for Sparkbrook may confirm, there were no grounds for supposing that progress would have accelerated. On the first evening, we dealt with two groups of amendments only. The Government would have been ready, as the right hon. Gentleman knows, to continue into the public interest defence debate, but he made strong representations—which after a short time of reflection, we decided were reasonable—that we should not do so. I wonder what he would have said if we had started switching the order of business, which he now suggests as an alternative. He would have been in a state of outrage.

Mr. Hattersley: I would have thanked the Home Secretary for accepting my suggestion.

Mr. Hurd: The right hon. Gentleman would not have said anything of the kind, and he knows it.
As a result of the agreement mentioned, on the second day we had the debate on the public interest defence and that came to and end after a long discussion at a similar hour—after 11 pm but before midnight. At my suggestion, the House did not proceed further that night. There is no reason to suppose that we would have made any further substantial progress that night and the right hon. Member for Sparkbrook has simply confirmed what I am about to say. There is no reason—rather the reverse—to suppose that the informal arrangements that we all know about would have had any validity in the continuing debate. The right hon. Gentleman is plainly wrong in supposing that we started to discuss the matter believing in our hearts that there would have to be a guillotine. I had no such conviction. A guillotine was obviously a possibility, but I hope that the House will accept that it was not an aim or a conviction.
The case for a timetable motion at this stage is overwhelming. Of course, the timetable must be reasonable. A press report misled some of my right and hon. Friends. It stated that we were proposing that the House should be asked to deal with the Bill completely this week. That was never our intention. I believe that two further days in Committee, sitting late—making four days


in all—is reasonable. A provision, which will certainly be needed, for a third day on Report and Third reading is reasonable.
I now refer to some specific points that have been made. My hon. Friend the Member for Honiton (Sir P. Emery) made a particularly telling contribution. He asked me about a debate on every clause. As he knows, the Business Committee is entrusted with the task of organising the debate in accordance with the motion. Its aim should be to ensure that every clause is debated. I confirm that paragraph 7(2) of the motion, which is normally relied upon on occasions to cope with the possibility of Standing Order 20 applications, provides for extra time should that prove to be necessary.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Mr. Amery) raised two important points. First, he dealt with his letter to me on the authorisation of memoirs of members of the Security Service. He did not refer—his account would have been more complete if he had—to the fact that, after my hon. Friend the Minister of State used the words on Second Reading, some of which he quoted, there was a debate on new clause 6, which was moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Mr. Allason), to which my hon. Friend the Minister of State replied:
It will not come as any surprise to those concerned to know that authorisation to members and former members to disclose information about their work will be rare and given only in exceptional circumstances."—[Official Report, 25 January 1989; Vol. 145, c. 11031]—
[Interruption.] That was at a later stage.
I accept the importance of what my right hon. Friend has raised. There will certainly be further opportunities in our proceedings to deal with the point. It is necessary to complete—not to contradict—my hon. Friend's account of proceedings in the House.
My right hon. Friend raised a second point concerning the privileges of this House. He rightly said that that was deep water. I do not intend to enter it tonight, except to say two things. First, the privileges of the House are not and never have been in the hands of Government. They are in the hands of the House and then in the hands of the courts. That has always been the position. The Bill contains no trenching on or addition to the privileges either way. There are already on the Order Paper amendments that would enable the Committee to deal with these matters.

Mr. Amery: I am sorry to interrupt my right hon. Friend as he is short of time. Was the statement made in the Minister of State's reply to the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) correct? Is that consistent with what my right hon. Friend has been saying?

Mr. Hurd: On privilege?

Mr. Amery: No. As I remember it, the right hon. Member for Sparkbrook asked whether he would be in breach of the law if he revealed that he had been told by a secret agent that his telephone had been illegally tapped. The Minister said that he would be in breach of the law. That seems to throw doubt on whether our communications or our disclosures in the House are privileged.

Mr. Hurd: I do not believe that the House, which is the master of its privileges, has ever asserted that communications to an hon. Member are privileged.—

[Interruption.] I do not think so. That is a point on which there are amendments and new clauses, and they will certainly fall to be discussed.
The hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan), with the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson), took the lead in making the second charge, which is one of—

Mr. Gerald Bermingham: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. As I understand it, privilege in this House's very much a matter for the Chair. Would you, Mr. Speaker, rule on whether a communication to a Member of Parliament is or is not privileged and whether the Government of the day have the right to interfere with the privilege of this House?

Mr. Speaker: I do not think that I should get involved in this debate, but as the rules stand at present a communication from someone outside the House to an hon. Member is not privileged.

Mr. Bermingham: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. Is it not privilege for a Member of the House to repeat in this House information that he has known and is he not privileged in that respect?

Mr. Speaker: That is a different matter. Members of the House have freedom of speech.

Mr. Hurd: It is entirely a different matter, and I am grateful to you, Mr. Speaker.
I take on now the second blade of the attack which, in a way, goes deeper. It is the accusation of authoritarianism in our handling of such matters. I strongly rebut that. If one looks at proceedings on this matter in the past 12 months, one realises that that attack cannot be sustained. If one considers the White Paper and remembers how, it contrasted vividly with the predictions made by the right hon. Member for Sparkbrook—[Interruption.] Well, it departed totally from ministerial certificates and left the matter to a jury. That came as a great surprise.
Let us look now at the contrast between the Bill and the White Paper and the way in which we took on board several of the criticisms expressed in the debate on the White Paper. I had been going to say that I believe that there is now a wider understanding of what is in the Bill and what is not—that is, until I heard the speech by the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras. He drew examples from the public interest that could not possibly come within the scope of the Bill.
When the hon. Gentleman realised that he was in difficulty, his hon. Friends tried to help him out of the pit by suggesting that the chief press officer concerned might have been notified because her work was connected with the security services. What nonsense. She would not have been notified and even if she had been, clause 1 makes it absolutely clear that to come within the Bill, disclosure must relate to security and intelligence. The hon. Gentleman had clearly not bothered to develop the slightest acquaintance with the Bill or the timetable motion.

Mr. Dobson: rose—

Mr. Hurd: No, I shall not give way—

Hon. Member's: Give way.

Mr. Speaker: Order.

Mr. Hurd: No, I have put paid to that argument, and I hope that we have put paid also to the argument that matters released from the criminal law by the Bill are trivial. There has been some reference to the safety of food. Is the safety of food trivial? We do not seem to hear very much about anything else at present. I do not condone the purloining or publishing of papers on matters such as public safety if they are confidential.
What I am saying in the context of the Bill is that such activity, however reprehensible, will not be a criminal offence. We have dealt with that point. My right hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Sir B. Braine) gave specific examples earlier, but the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras did not bother to acquaint himself with that. The Government—

Mr. Dobson: rose—

Mr. Hurd: No, I am answering a point made by the hon. Gentleman.
The hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan) was harsh on me. I respect his passion and conviction in such matters, but I have never asked him to defend or excuse me. He knows better than that. He was wrong to say that the Bill would make the Government the arbiter of what is and is not secret. There are no ministerial certificates. What we are doing in the Bill is removing—

Mr. Hattersley: rose—

Mr. Hurd: No, I am not giving way. What we are doing is removing from the prosecuting authorities the wide discretion that they now have. We are asking Parliament to lay down the detailed framework and then—

Mr. Hattersley: rose—

Mr. Speaker: Order.

Mr. Hurd: It will be for the jury to decide on each case.
The hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland, whose arguments I respect, spent his whole time talking about the possible misdoings of public servants, but the safety of the citizen must surely be our chief concern. As the hon. Gentleman knows, we sometimes have to strike the balance between protecting the safety of the community as a whole and sustaining the rights of the individual in particular. The Bill shifts that balance drastically in the direction and in the favour of the individual, but it does not abandon the need to protect the citizenry as a whole.
I ask the hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland in particular—and the House—to look at the test of harm which deals with our armed forces and the safety of our citizens. There is nothing here about the authority to prosecute because of some embarrassment to Government or vague general interest.

Mr. Maclennan: Will the Home Secretary give way?

Mr. Hurd: I am not giving way. The hon. Gentleman made an attack on the general handling of the Bill, as did his hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith).
The secrets which we have to protect effectively are needed for the protection of the citizen. They are at one remove the secrets of the citizen, and the effective protection of those secrets is the protection of the citizen against the criminal and political—

It being three hours after the commencement of proceedings on the motion, Mr. SPEAKER proceeded to put the Question necessary to dispose of them, pursuant to Standing Order No. 81 (Allocation of time to Bills).

The House divided: Ayes 305, Noes 213.

Division No 91]
[10.00pm


AYES


Alexander, Richard
Dorrell, Stephen


Alison, Rt Hon Michael
Douglas-Hamilton, Lord James


Amess, David
Dunn, Bob


Amos, Alan
Durant, Tony


Arbuthnot, James
Eggar, Tim


Arnold, Jacques (Gravesham)
Emery, Sir Peter


Arnold, Tom (Hazel Grove)
Evans, David (Welwyn Hatf'd)


Aspinwall, Jack
Evennett, David


Atkins, Robert
Fallon, Michael


Atkinson, David
Favell, Tony


Baker, Rt Hon K. (Mole Valley)
Fenner, Dame Peggy


Baker, Nicholas (Dorset N)
Field, Barry (Isle of Wight)


Baldry, Tony
Finsberg, Sir Geoffrey


Banks, Robert (Harrogate)
Fishburn, John Dudley


Batiste, Spencer
Fookes, Dame Janet


Beaumont-Dark, Anthony
Forman, Nigel


Bellingham, Henry
Forsyth, Michael (Stirling)


Bendall, Vivian
Forth, Eric


Bennett, Nicholas (Pembroke)
Fowler, Rt Hon Norman


Bevan, David Gilroy
Fox, Sir Marcus


Bitten, Rt Hon John
Franks, Cecil


Blackburn, Dr John G.
Freeman, Roger


Blaker, Rt Hon Sir Peter
French, Douglas


Bonsor, Sir Nicholas
Fry, Peter


Boscawen, Hon Robert
Gale, Roger


Boswell, Tim
Garel-Jones, Tristan


Bottomley, Peter
Glyn, Dr Alan


Bottomley, Mrs Virginia
Goodhart, Sir Philip


Bowden, A (Brighton K'pto'n)
Goodlad, Alastair


Bowden, Gerald (Dulwich)
Goodson-Wickes, Dr Charles


Bowis, John
Gorman, Mrs Teresa


Boyson, Rt Hon Dr Sir Rhodes
Gow, Ian


Braine, Rt Hon Sir Bernard
Gower, Sir Raymond


Brandon-Bravo, Martin
Grant, Sir Anthony (CambsSW)


Brazier, Julian
Greenway, John (Ryedale)


Bright, Graham
Gregory, Conal


Brooke, Rt Hon Peter
Griffiths, Sir Eldon (Bury St E')


Brown, Michael (Brigg &amp; Cl't's)
Griffiths, Peter (Portsmouth N)


Browne, John (Winchester)
Grist, Ian


Bruce, Ian (Dorset South)
Ground, Patrick


Buchanan-Smith, Rt Hon Alick
Grylls, Michael


Buck, Sir Antony
Gummer, Rt Hon John Selwyn


Burns, Simon
Hamilton, Hon Archie (Epsom)


Burt, Alistair
Hamilton, Neil (Tatton)


Butcher, John
Hanley, Jeremy


Butler, Chris
Hannam, John


Butterfill, John
Haselhurst, Alan


Carlisle, John, (Luton N)
Hayes, Jerry


Carlisle, Kenneth (Lincoln)
Hayward, Robert


Carrington, Matthew
Heathcoat-Amory, David


Carttiss, Michael
Heddle, John


Cash, William
Hicks, Mrs Maureen (Wolv' NE)


Chalker, Rt Hon Mrs Lynda
Hicks, Robert (Cornwall SE)


Chapman, Sydney
Hind, Kenneth


Chope, Christopher
Hogg, Hon Douglas (Gr'th'm)


Churchill, Mr
Holt, Richard


Clark, Hon Alan (Plym'th S'n)
Hordern, Sir Peter


Clark, Sir W. (Croydon S)
Howard, Michael


Clarke, Rt Hon K. (Rushcliffe)
Howarth, Alan (Strat'd-on-A)


Colvin, Michael
Howarth, G. (Cannock &amp; B'wd)


Conway, Derek
Howell, Rt Hon David (G'dford)


Coombs, Anthony (Wyre F'rest)
Howell, Ralph (North Norfolk)


Cope, Rt Hon John
Hughes, Robert G. (Harrow W)


Couchman, James
Hunt, David (Wirral W)


Cran, James
Hunt, John (Ravensbourne)


Currie, Mrs Edwina
Hunter, Andrew


Davies, Q. (Stamf'd &amp; Spald'g)
Hurd, Rt Hon Douglas


Davis, David (Boothferry)
Irvine, Michael


Day, Stephen
Irving, Charles


Devlin, Tim
Jack, Michael


Dicks, Terry
Jackson, Robert






Janman, Tim
Raffan, Keith


Jessel, Toby
Raison, Rt Hon Timothy


Johnson Smith, Sir Geoffrey
Rathbone, Tim


Jones, Robert B (Herts W)
Redwood, John


Jopling, Rt Hon Michael
Renton, Tim


Kellett-Bowman, Dame Elaine
Rhodes James, Robert


Key, Robert
Riddick, Graham


King, Roger (B'ham N'thfield)
Ridley, Rt Hon Nicholas


Kirkhope, Timothy
Rifkind, Rt Hon Malcolm


Knapman, Roger
Roberts, Wyn (Conwy)


Knight, Greg (Derby North)
Rossi, Sir Hugh


Knight, Dame Jill (Edgbaston)
Rost, Peter


Knox, David
Rumbold, Mrs Angela


Lamont, Rt Hon Norman
Sackville, Hon Tom


Lang, Ian
Sainsbury, Hon Tim


Latham, Michael
Sayeed, Jonathan


Lawrence, Ivan
Scott, Nicholas


Lawson, Rt Hon Nigel
Shaw, David (Dover)


Lee, John (Pendle)
Shaw, Sir Giles (Pudsey)


Leigh, Edward (Gainsbor'gh)
Shaw, Sir Michael (Scarb')


Lennox-Boyd, Hon Mark
Shelton, Sir William


Lightbown, David
Shephard, Mrs G. (Norfolk SW)


Lilley, Peter
Shepherd, Colin (Hereford)


Lloyd, Sir Ian (Havant)
Shersby, Michael


Lloyd, Peter (Fareham)
Sims, Roger


Lord, Michael
Skeet, Sir Trevor


Luce, Rt Hon Richard
Smith, Tim (Beaconsfield)


Macfarlane, Sir Neil
Soames, Hon Nicholas


MacKay, Andrew (E Berkshire)
Speller, Tony


McLoughlin, Patrick
Spicer, Sir Jim (Dorset W)


McNair-Wilson, Sir Michael
Spicer, Michael (S Worcs)


McNair-Wilson, P. (New Forest)
Stanbrook, Ivor


Madel, David
Stanley, Rt Hon Sir John


Major, Rt Hon John
Steen, Anthony


Malins, Humfrey
Stern, Michael


Maples, John
Stevens, Lewis


Marland, Paul
Stewart, Allan (Eastwood)


Marlow, Tony
Stokes, Sir John


Marshall, Michael (Arundel)
Stradling Thomas, Sir John


Martin, David (Portsmouth S)
Sumberg, David


Mates, Michael
Summerson, Hugo


Maude, Hon Francis
Tapsell, Sir Peter


Mawhinney, Dr Brian
Taylor, Ian (Esher)


Maxwell-Hyslop, Robin
Taylor, Teddy (S'end E)


Mayhew, Rt Hon Sir Patrick
Tebbit, Rt Hon Norman


Miller, Sir Hal
Temple-Morris, Peter


Miscampbell, Norman
Thatcher, Rt Hon Margaret


Mitchell, Andrew (Gedling)
Thompson, D. (Calder Valley)


Mitchell, Sir David
Thompson, Patrick (Norwich N)


Monro, Sir Hector
Thorne, Neil


Montgomery, Sir Fergus
Thurnham, Peter


Moore, Rt Hon John
Townend, John (Bridlington)


Morrison, Rt Hon P (Chester)
Tredinnick, David


Moss, Malcolm
Trippier, David


Moynihan, Hon Colin
Trotter, Neville


Mudd, David
Twinn, Dr Ian


Neale, Gerrard
Vaughan, Sir Gerard


Needham, Richard
Viggers, Peter


Nelson, Anthony
Waddington, Rt Hon David


Neubert, Michael
Wakeham, Rt Hon John


Newton, Rt Hon Tony
Walden, George


Nicholls, Patrick
Walker, Bill (T'side North)


Nicholson, David (Taunton)
Walker, Rt Hon P. (W'cester)


Nicholson, Emma (Devon West)
Waller, Gary


Onslow, Rt Hon Cranley
Walters, Sir Dennis


Oppenheim, Phillip
Wardle, Charles (Bexhill)


Page, Richard
Warren, Kenneth


Paice, James
Watts, John


Parkinson, Rt Hon Cecil
Wells, Bowen


Patnick, Irvine
Wheeler, John


Patten, Chris (Bath)
Whitney, Ray


Patten, John (Oxford W)
Widdecombe, Ann


Pattie, Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey
Wiggin, Jerry


Pawsey, James
Wilkinson, John


Peacock, Mrs Elizabeth
Wilshire, David


Porter, Barry (Wirral S)
Winterton, Mrs Ann


Porter, David (Waveney)
Winterton, Nicholas


Portillo, Michael
Wolfson, Mark


Powell, William (Corby)
Wood, Timothy


Price, Sir David
Woodcock, Mike





Yeo, Tim
Tellers for the Ayes:


Young, Sir George (Acton)
Mr. David Maclean and


Younger, Rt Hon George
Mr. John Mark Taylor.




NOES


Abbott, Ms Diane
Foot, Rt Hon Michael


Aitken, Jonathan
Foster, Derek


Allen, Graham
Fraser, John


Alton, David
Fyfe, Maria


Armstrong, Hilary
Garrett, John (Norwich South)


Ashley, Rt Hon Jack
George, Bruce


Ashton, Joe
Gilbert, Rt Hon Dr John


Barnes, Harry (Derbyshire NE)
Gilmour, Rt Hon Sir Ian


Barnes, Mrs Rosie (Greenwich)
Godman, Dr Norman A.


Barron, Kevin
Gordon, Mildred


Battle, John
Gorst, John


Beith, A. J.
Gould, Bryan


Bell, Stuart
Griffiths, Win (Bridgend)


Benn, Rt Hon Tony
Hardy, Peter


Bennett, A. F. (D'nt'n &amp; R'dish)
Harman, Ms Harriet


Benyon, W.
Hattersley, Rt Hon Roy


Bermingham, Gerald
Hayhoe, Rt Hon Sir Barney


Blair, Tony
Haynes, Frank


Boateng, Paul
Heath, Rt Hon Edward


Bradley, Keith
Heffer, Eric S.


Bray, Dr Jeremy
Henderson, Doug


Brown, Gordon (D'mline E)
Higgins, Rt Hon Terence L.


Brown, Nicholas (Newcastle E)
Hinchliffe, David


Brown, Ron (Edinburgh Leith)
Hogg, N. (C'nauld &amp; Kilsyth)


Bruce, Malcolm (Gordon)
Home Robertson, John


Buchan, Norman
Hood, Jimmy


Buckley, George J.
Howarth, George (Knowsley N)


Budgen, Nicholas
Howell, Rt Hon D. (S'heath)


Caborn, Richard
Howells, Geraint


Campbell, Menzies (Fife NE)
Hoyle, Doug


Campbell, Ron (Blyth Valley)
Hughes, John (Coventry NE)


Canavan, Dennis
Hughes, Robert (Aberdeen N)


Cartwright, John
Hughes, Roy (Newport E)


Clark, Dr David (S Shields)
Hughes, Sean (Knowsley S)


Clarke, Tom (Monklands W)
Hughes, Simon (Southwark)


Clay, Bob
Illsley, Eric


Clelland, David
Ingram, Adam


Clwyd, Mrs Ann
Janner, Greville


Cohen, Harry
Jones, leuan (Ynys Môn)


Coleman, Donald
Jones, Martyn (Clwyd S W)


Cook, Frank (Stockton N)
Kaufman, Rt Hon Gerald


Cook, Robin (Livingston)
Kinnock, Rt Hon Neil


Corbett, Robin
Kirkwood, Archy


Corbyn, Jeremy
Leadbitter, Ted


Cousins, Jim
Leighton, Ron


Critchley, Julian
Lestor, Joan (Eccles)


Crowther, Stan
Lewis, Terry


Cryer, Bob
Litherland, Robert


Cummings, John
Livingstone, Ken


Cunliffe, Lawrence
Livsey, Richard


Cunningham, Dr John
Lloyd, Tony (Stretford)


Dalyell, Tam
Lofthouse, Geoffrey


Darling, Alistair
Loyden, Eddie


Davies, Rt Hon Denzil (Llanelli)
McAllion, John


Davies, Ron (Caerphilly)
McAvoy, Thomas


Davis, Terry (B'ham Hodge H'l)
McCartney, Ian


Dixon, Don
Macdonald, Calum A.


Dobson, Frank
McKay, Allen (Barnsley West)


Doran, Frank
McKelvey, William


Douglas, Dick
McLeish, Henry


Dunnachie, Jimmy
Maclennan, Robert


Dunwoody, Hon Mrs Gwyneth
McNamara, Kevin


Dykes, Hugh
McTaggart, Bob


Eadie, Alexander
McWilliam, John


Evans, John (St Helens N)
Madden, Max


Ewing, Harry (Falkirk E)
Marek, Dr John


Ewing, Mrs Margaret (Moray)
Marshall, David (Shettleston)


Fatchett, Derek
Martlew, Eric


Fearn, Ronald
Maxton, John


Field, Frank (Birkenhead)
Meacher, Michael


Fields, Terry (L 'pool B G 'n)
Meale, Alan


Fisher, Mark
Meyer, Sir Anthony


Flannery, Martin
Michael, Alun


Flynn, Paul
Michie, Bill (Sheffield Heeley)






Mitchell, Austin (Gt Grimsby)
Short, Clare


Moonie, Dr Lewis
Skinner, Dennis


Morris, Rt Hon J. (Aberavon)
Smith, C. (Isl'ton &amp; F'bury)


Mowlam, Marjorie
Snape, Peter


Mullin, Chris
Soley, Clive


Murphy, Paul
Spearing, Nigel


Nellist, Dave
Squire, Robin


Oakes, Rt Hon Gordon
Steinberg, Gerry


O'Brien, William
Stott, Roger


O'Neill, Martin
Strang, Gavin


Orme, Rt Hon Stanley
Straw, Jack


Parry, Robert
Taylor, Mrs Ann (Dewsbury)


Patchett, Terry
Taylor, Matthew (Truro)


Pendry, Tom
Thompson, Jack (Wansbeck)


Pike, Peter L.
Townsend, Cyril D. (B'heath)


Powell, Ray (Ogmore)
Turner, Dennis


Prescott, John
Vaz, Keith


Primarolo, Dawn
Wall, Pat


Quin, Ms Joyce
Wallace, James


Radice, Giles
Walley, Joan


Randall, Stuart
Warden, Gareth (Gower)


Redmond, Martin
Wareing, Robert N.


Rees, Rt Hon Merlyn
Welsh, Andrew (Angus E)


Reid, Dr John
Welsh, Michael (Doncaster N)


Richardson, Jo
Wigley, Dafydd


Roberts, Allan (Bootle)
Winnick, David


Robertson, George
Wise, Mrs Audrey


Robinson, Geoffrey
Worthington, Tony


Rooker, Jeff
Wray, Jimmy


Ruddock, Joan
Young, David (Bolton SE)


Salmond, Alex



Sedgemore, Brian
Tellers for the Noes:


Sheldon, Rt Hon Robert
Mrs. Llin Golding and


Shepherd, Richard (Aldridge)
Mr. Ken Eastham.


Shore, Rt Hon Peter

Question accordingly agreed to.

Resolved,

That the following provisions shall apply to the remaining proceedings on the Bill:

Committee, Report and Third Reading

1.—(1) The remaining proceedings in Committee on the Bill shall be completed in two allotted days and shall be brought to a conclusion at midnight on the second of those days.

(2) The proceedings on consideration and Third Reading of the Bill shall be completed in one allotted day, and shall be brought to a conclusion at Ten o'clock on that day; and for the purposes of Standing Order No. 80 (Business Committee) this Order shall be taken to allot to the proceedings on consideration such part of that day as the Resolution of the Business Committee may determine.

Report of Business Committee

2.—(1) The Business Committee shall report to the House its Resolutions—

(a) as to the proceedings in Committee on the Bill not later than 14th February 1989; and
(b) as to the proceedings on consideration of the Bill and as to the allocation of time between those proceedings and proceedings on Third Reading not later than the third day on which the House sits after the day on which the proceedings in Committee on the Bill are concluded.

(2) The Resolutions in any Report made under Standing Order No. 80 (Business Committee) may be varied by a further Report so made, whether or not within the time specified in sub-paragraph (1) above and whether or not the Resolutions have been agreed to by the House.

Proceedings on going into Committee

3.When the Order of the Day is read for the House to resolve itself into a Committee on the Bill, Mr. Speaker shall leave the Chair without putting any Question, whether or not notice of an Instruction has been given.

Conclusion of proceedings in Committee

4. On the conclusion of the proceedings in Committee on the Bill the Chairman shall report the Bill to the House without putting any Question.

Order of proceedings

5. No Motion shall be made to alter the order in which

proceedings in Committee or on consideration of the Bill are taken but the Resolutions of the Business Committee may include alterations in that order.

Dilatory Motions

6. No dilatory Motion with respect to, or in the course of proceedings on the Bill shall be made on an allotted day except by a member of the Government, and the Question on any such Motion shall be put forthwith.

Extra time on allotted days

7.—(1) On the first and second allotted days paragraph (1) of Standing Order No. 14 (Exempted business) shall apply to the proceedings on the Bill for two hours after Ten o'clock.

(2) Any period during which proceedings on the Bill may be proceeded with after Ten o'clock on either of those days under paragraph (7) of Standing Order No. 20 (Adjournment on specific and important matter that should have urgent consideraton) shall be in addition to the said period of two hours.

(3) If an allotted day is one to which a Motion for the adjournment of the House under Standing Order No. 20 stands over from an earlier day, paragraph (1) of Standing Order No. 14 (Exempted business) shall apply to the proceedings on the Bill for a period of time equal to the duration of the proceedings on that Motion; and on the first or second allotted day that period shall be added to the said period of two hours.

Private business

8. Any private business which has been set down for consideration at Seven o'clock on an allotted day shall, instead of being considered as provided by Standing Orders, be considered at the conclusion of the proceedings on the Bill on that day, and paragraph (1) of Standing Order No. 14 (Exempted business) shall apply to the private business for a period of three hours from the conclusion of the proceedings on the Bill or, if those proceedings are concluded before Ten o'clock, for a period equal to the time elapsing between Seven o'clock and the conclusion of those proceedings.

Conclusion of proceedings

9.—(1) For the purpose of bringing to a conclusion any proceedings which are to be brought to a conclusion at a time appointed by this Order or a Resolution of the Business Committee and which have not previously been brought to a conclusion, the Chairman or Mr. Speaker shall forthwith put the following Questions (but no others)—

(a) any Question already proposed from the Chair;
(b) any Question necessary to bring to a decision a Question so proposed (including, in the case of a new Clause or new Schedule which has been read a second time, the Question that the Clause or Schedule be added to the Bill);
(c) the Question on any amendment or Motion standing on the Order Paper in the name of any Member, if that amendment is moved or Motion is made by a member of the Government;
(d) any other Question necessary for the disposal of the business to be concluded;

and on a Motion so made for a new Clause or a new Schedule, the Chairman or Mr. Speaker shall put only the Question that the Clause or Schedule be added to the Bill.

(2) Proceedings under sub-paragraph (1) above shall not be interrupted under any Standing Order relating to the sittings of the House.

(3) If an allotted day is one on which a Motion for the adjournment of the House under Standing Order No. 20 (Adjournment on specific and important matter that should have urgent consideration) would, apart from this Order, stand over to Seven o'clock—

(a) that Motion shall stand over until the conclusion of any proceedings on the Bill which, under this Order or a Resolution of the Business Committee, are to be brought to a conclusion at or before that time; and
(b) the bringing to a conclusion of any proceedings on the Bill which, under this Order or a Resolution of the Business Committee, are to be brought to a conclusion after that time shall be postponed for a period equal to the duration of the proceedings on that Motion.

(4) If an allotted day is one to which a Motion for the adjournment of the House under Standing Order No. 20 stands over from an earlier day, the bringing to a conclusion


of any proceedings on the Bill which under this Order or a Resolution of the Business Committee are to be brought to a conclusion on that day shall be postponed for a period equal to the duration of the proceedings on that Motion.

Supplemental orders

10.—(1) The proceedings on any Motion made in the House by a member of the Government for varying or supplementing the provisions of this Order (including anything which might have been the subject of a report of the Business Committee) shall, if not previously concluded, be brought to a conclusion one hour after they have been commenced, and paragraph (1) of Standing Order No. 14 (Exempted business) shall apply to the proceedings.

(2) If on an allotted day on which any proceedings on the Bill are to be brought to a conclusion at a time appointed by this Order or a Resolution of the Business Committee the House is adjourned, or the sitting is suspended, before that time no notice shall be required of a Motion made at the next sitting by a member of the Government for varying or supplementing the provisions of this Order.

Saving

11. Nothing in this Order or a Resolution of the Business Committee shall—

(a) prevent any proceedings to which the Order or Resolution applies from being taken or completed earlier than is required by the Order or Resolution; or
(b) prevent any business (whether on the Bill or not) from being proceeded with on any day after the completion of all such proceedings on the Bill as are to be taken on that day.

Recommittal

12.—(1) References in this Order to proceedings on consideration or proceedings on Third Reading include references to proceedings at those stages, respectively, for, on or in consequence of, recommittal.

(2) On an allotted day no debate shall be permitted on any Motion to recommit the Bill (whether as a whole or otherwise), and Mr. Speaker shall put forthwith any Question necessary to dispose of the Motion, including the Question on any amendment moved to the Question.

Interpretation

13. In this Order—
allotted day" means any day (other than a Friday) on which the Bill is put down as first Government Order of the day, provided that a Motion for allotting time to the proceedings on the Bill to be taken on that day either has been agreed on a previous day, or is set down for consideration on that day;
the Bill" means the Official Secrets Bill;
Resolution of the Business Committee" means a Resolution of the Business Committee as agreed to by the House.

Crown Court (Barrow)

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Sackville.]

Mr. Cecil Franks: I am grateful, Mr. Speaker, for the opportunity to initiate an Adjournment debate on the proposals for the future of the Barrow in Furness Crown court. I speak in a dual capacity as the Member for Barrow and Furness and as a former practising solicitor in the north-west of England.
The consultation paper proposals relate to the Crown courts of Barrow in Furness and Kendal, but I confine my remarks to the Barrow in Furness Crown court, though many of the general comments apply equally to the Kendal Crown court, which comes within the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Jopling).
The Barrow in Furness Crown court building was constructed in the mid-1950s and was opened by the then Home Secretary, Mr. R. A. Butler. The building and its facilities are typical of the many similar court buildings that were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1986, a scrutiny was commissioned to consider the best structure for the operation and management of the Crown court system in England and Wales, and it is to the proposals for the Crown court in Barrow in Furness that I address my right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney-General.
The consultation paper, which was issued by the Lord Chancellor's Department in October 1988, is entirely devoid of any facts or figures to support the statement and opinions that are contained within it. In a sentence, the consultation paper is a disgrace to rational debate and discussion. It bears all the hallmarks of a civil servant sitting behind his desk in Whitehall or Preston, thinking of his own administrative convenience, picking up a map of Cumbria and a ruler and measuring the distance between Barrow and Carlisle, Barrow and Kendal or Barrow and Lancaster, and reaching conclusions, while being blind to the fact that between Barrow and all those places lie mountains, lakes, rivers and estuaries, and probably the worst road system in England.
The consultation paper begins:
The results of subsequent examination of the Crown Courts at Barrow and Kendal, which are operated from Preston and Carlisle respectively, have led to the conclusion that these satellites are inefficient, in that they lead to delays in trial, are wasteful of resources and that there is a strong case for closure.
The consultation paper's proposals for Barrow state:
Barrow is situated on the west coast of Cumbria 48 miles from Lancaster by road and 32 miles by rail … Crown Court sittings are held in a Magistrates' Court alongside the police station. The courtroom is adequate, though dark and dingy. Facilities for the judge, jurors, the Bar, solicitors and witnesses are minimal. Prisoners are brought from Risley remand centre, Warrington neatly 100 miles away, and have to stay in police cells with totally inadequate provision for hygiene, catering and exercise … The court is administered and served from Preston, more than 60 miles distant.
When it details the disadvantages of the present system, the points in the consultation paper immediately invite questions. The document states:
The short sitting day which can be achieved at each court, the small case load and interval between sessions leads to inefficient listings and delays.
That invites the question: why short sitting days? The document continues:


A case not reached at one session must wait at least four weeks before it can be listed again.
Why?
A case which may last two or more days is usually transferred to Lancaster for trial.
Why?
There will continue to be an inefficient use of scarce resources in terms of judicial and staff time.
Why? It states:
costs incurred in travel and subsistence by members of staff serving … Barrow from Preston will also continue.
Perhaps therein lies the nub. The document states:
At Barrow a great deal of money would have to be spent to bring the cell accommodation up to reasonable standards. While this would improve the conditions for prisoners, the cell area would still be shared with the local police, a practice which is accepted only with great reluctance by the Prison Service.
I query that statement because there is no evidence to back it up.
The benefits listed in the Lord Chancellor's consultation paper include:
The cessation of sittings at … Barrow will yield significant savings in costs to the court, prison and probation services.
However, it totally fails to take into account the increased costs that will be incurred by those who have to attend the court at Lancaster, principally witnesses, the police, solicitors, jurors, probation officers, magistrates and social service personnel.
As another benefit, the document states:
Prisoners would be dealt with less delay and more efficiency and would not be subject to such degrading conditions as those at Barrow.
The document continues:
It is appreciated that some witnesses may be inconvenienced in terms of the distance they will have to travel to court, but their loss of earnings, travel and subsistence expenses would be reimbursed. Some justices would be similarly affected but again their expenses would be reimbursed … The closure of Barrow would extend the level of disenfranchisement, but not significantly, since although the area is large, the population density is comparatively low.
In marshalling my arguments against the proposals, I can do no better than quote from some of the many representations and responses submitted which oppose the proposals in the consultation paper. Perhaps one of the most damaging criticisms is made by the chief constable of Cumbria, Mr. Leslie Sharp, who said:
As far as Barrow is concerned I have serious reservations about the possible closure of the Crown Court. It is accepted that costs for the Judiciary and your staff would be reduced, but this would be at the expense of additional costs to the police and other witnesses. I see additional travelling, subsistence and overtime payments for police officers being far in excess of the sum you have quoted in respect of the Judiciary. Another issue directly related to this point is the loss of police time from operational duties. When cases are heard at Barrow, officers are able to deal with other tasks and duties whilst waiting for their case to be heard or immediately it finishes. If work is transferred to Lancaster, we will lose officers for a full day without the ability to use them for other purposes. As far as witnesses are concerned, whilst their expenses would be reimbursed, inevitably their costs are going to be much higher if they have to travel to Lancaster.
Another point of major concern is that many people will be reluctant to travel from Barrow-in-Furness to another court. There was a recent example of this when an appeal on behalf of Manhattan's Night Club at Barrow against the curbing of their public entertainments licensing hours, was to be held before Lancaster Crown Court. Many elderly residents who had attended the initial hearing before the local

authority, and later an appeal before the Magistrates' Court, expressed reluctance to travel to Lancaster. When representations were made to your Department, it resulted in that case being transferred back to the Barrow Court. If we cannot gather and encourage community support in this type of case, and when criminal offences have been committed, there is a distinct possibility our activities in these areas of responsibilities will be seriously affected. There have also been occasions when witnesses have failed to attend the Crown Court at Barrow, and it has been a fairly simple task to locate them during the time of the Court sitting. This would not be possible if cases were held at Lancaster and could result in adjournments which would add to the Court's backlog of work.
He continues:
I am surprised to see that the amount of time spent on Crown Court business at Barrow has decreased over the past four years at a time when there has been an increased case load. This is perhaps merely an indication that more cases are being diverted to other courts. If the Crown Court at Barrow sat more regularly, I would suggest that any backlog of work could be disposed of more quickly. There have been occasions in the recent past, for example in July this year, when Court sittings were reduced from three days to one and then in September when Court business was cancelled because of the unavailability of staff. On those occasions it would seem little consideration was given to defendants, which is one of the points you make in the Consultative Paper at paragraph 3, that the court delays adversely affect defendants held in custody and could prejudice the right to justice.
I cannot agree with the statement that the Court Room at Barrow is dark and dingy. In my opinion, the court is reasonably comfortable and provides good accommodation for officials and the public. The same cannot be said about Lancaster, which is a rather depressing and uncomfortable building.
He concludes:
I do think it is important that every effort is made to retain the Crown Court at Barrow. I am sure you know that there are plans for a new Magistrates' Court to be constructed in that area in the early 1990s and this could present an ideal opportunity for a joint development with your Department.
That was the opinion of, and representations from, the police.
I turn to the representations made by the judges who serve the area. His Honour Judge Sir Sanderson Temple and His Honour Judge Brian Duckworth state:
There is a long tradition of criminal jurisdiction … Barrow was given Quarter Sessions status after the 1939/45 war, specifically to obviate the necessity of litigation and those involved therein having to travel to Lancaster or Preston.
Barrow and Kendal are both
active, prosperous communities in their own right, and centres for the surrounding countryside … entitled to enjoy Crown Court status and facilities. If the work is sent to Lancaster, it will involve substantial expense and inconvenience for parties, jurors and witnesses … from Barrow, the train time is similar"—
1¼hours—
but there is no through bus service: the train fare is £4·80 … For those who live in outlying areas, the problems will be greater and will involve considerable hardship … it is unlikely … that magistrates from Furness … will be able to play any real part in the administration of justice at Crown Court level, and … that jurors will not be recruited from those outlying areas to go to Lancaster or Preston; thus the inhabitants of those areas will be denied the opportunity to participate in Crown Court justice by way of jury service. By reason of the extra travelling expenses incurred by those involved any administrative savings achieved by consolidating the work at Lancaster will be largely nullified.
Unless and until the repairs at Lancaster Castle are completed and the Castle's future as a Crown Court building confirmed, the provision of Court facilities there must be considered unsatisfactory and uncertain.
Considerations of administrative convenience and economy must not overwhelm public convenience. Ever since the Statute of Westminister II (1285) the concept of the Courts


travelling the country to bring justice to the people has been well established. Thus the people of South Cumbria are entitled to have their own Crown Courts, as are the local Magistrates, and they should not have to travel further afield. It has long been a Common Law principle that a man shall be entitled to be tried in his own County; and as a matter of public relations, justice should be done and be seen to be done within the community where the litigation arises. It is hoped that these proposals.… proceed no further …It is understood that their Honours Judge Edmondson and Judge Bell, who also have connections with the area have already expressed similar concern to the Circuit Administrator.
Those are the words of the judges; let us turn now to the magistrates. The clerk of the magistrates for the petty session divisions of Barrow in Furness with Bootle and Lonsdale North says:
It was the unanimous request of Justices that I write to you deploring the taking of such a step. I am asked in particular to refer to the basic concept of criminal law that justice should be delivered on a local basis in order to maintain confidence in the justice system. Further, whilst Magistrates' personal convenience cannot be placed above the requirements of justice, the difficulties in supplying Magistrates to sit at Lancaster or Preston, as opposed to Barrow in Furness, are only too clear. It seems to the Magistrates appropriate therefore that sittings continue in Barrow in Furness to ensure the local element in sittings of the superior court.
So speak the magistrates. Let me now quote from letter written by the chairman of the bench of North Lonsdale, Major Gordon Hudson, who says that the consultation paper is
unduly weighted towards cutting administrative costs at the considerable inconvenience and expense to those attending courts. Reimbursement in the circumstances is an inadequate recompense. In particular the stop gap solution of only five years at Lancaster is a fresh, quite unacceptable solution.
The local Law Society branch, Furness and district, also made representations stating:
This Society strongly opposes the closure of the Crown Court at Barrow.
Mentioning the delay mentioned in the consultation paper, it states:
The statistics given show receipts, but not disposal rates. From the figures given, however, it is clear that the Crown Court at Barrow has increased in efficiency during the period 1984 to 1987 in that in 1984 100 cases were received in 128 hours of sitting time compared with 200 cases in 116 hours in 1987. Cases are being dealt with more quickly and this Society is convinced that the disposals rate of the Barrow Court are far better than many city courts … the facilities at Barrow … are far better than those at the Court which it is proposed will take all Barrow cases, i.e. Lancaster.
At Lancaster, there are pitifully inadequate facilities for the interviewing of witnesses, and the public waiting areas are extremely lacking in comfort. The cell accommodation is also poor. One argument put forward in support of closure is that the travelling time of remand prisoners would be reduced. The only saving in this regard would be 1 hour each way, and this must be compared to the similar travelling time of solicitors, police, and probation officers and witnesses if cases were dealt with at Lancaster.
Furthermore, there are presently plans to construct new Magistrates' and County Courts at Barrow. If the LDC is prepared to expend monies in the construction of new courts in Barrow, then it would be prudent and sensible for those plans to include new Crown Court accommodation. The present facilities would then be upgraded at little extra cost.
It also deals with expense and the purported savings outlined in the consultation paper:
Any costs saved in administration by transferring all court business to Lancaster would be lost in the additional expense to the court in paying witnesses to appear, to the Police and Probation services, both in increased travelling and waiting time, and in time lost from other work, and to the legal aid fund in meeting the cost of solicitors travelling to

Lancaster. Solicitors will also have to spend more time out of their offices, to the detriment of their other work. Administration costs are therefore only the tip of the iceberg, and it would be wrong to base a decision for closure upon this aspect alone without a full study of the additional costs to be borne by transferring all cases to Lancaster.
The consultation paper indicates that closure would not significantly extend the level of disenfranchisement of jurors. To close the Crown Court at Barow would remove approximately 80,000 adults from the list of potential jurors, and defendants would no longer be tried by their local peers with local knowledge …
In conclusion, this Society considers that the paper's arguments in support of closure are, at best, not fully thought out and that insufficient weight has been given to the questions of the increased costs and inconvenience to those involved.
Those are the words of Mr. David Dawson, secretary of the Furness and District Law Society.
So far, the police, the judges, the magistrates and the local law society are opposed to the proposals. Let us consider the views of someone who is not involved in the legal profession. Among the many representations that I have received was a letter from the Cumbria-Westmorland Federation of Women's Institutes. The letter, from Mrs. Rawson, is eloquent about being tried locally:
It has hitherto been the right of defendants to be judged by their peers within their own locality. It must be obvious that the customs and conventions characteristic of a community are best known to those resident in its locale, and consequently it follows that those who contravene what are locally regarded as essentials to living there, should be judged first by those who understand them …
It is easy to fortell what will ultimately occur—the ratepayers in the communities in this area, who would once have been eligible for Jury Service will become disenfranchised—the argument then being that the cost to transport so many people to the seat of judgment would prove too great and selection will no longer be made from amongst them.
So far as I am aware, no single organisation or individual which has been involved in the consultation process supports the proposals for the Barrow in Furness Crown court. Two local solicitors from Barrow in Furness made representations which embodied my earlier comments to the Furness and District Law Society.
Miss Barbara Forrester, a local solicitor who specializes in criminal work in the Crown court, wrote:
It is virtually unheard of for any defendant to criticise the facilities at Barrow. It is also far easier for relatives of defendants to visit them at Barrow than at Lancaster.
Mr. Kenneth Fisher, another local solicitor, wrote that on 15 January he was involved in a case that originated at Barrow magistrates court, and was heard at the Crown court in Blackpool, in which all the solicitors and witnesses came from Barrow. He informed me that fewer than half the cases which originate at the Barrow and Bootle or
North Lonsdale magistrates' courts are now heard at the Barrow Crown court. Will my right hon. and learned
Friend the Attorney-General explain why that is so?
I could quote many other cases, but time is limited. The consultation paper has caused considerable dismay in my constituency. Because of its geography, the Furness peninsula tends to be overlooked and isolated. Nevertheless, it has a long and proud record of independence, not least in the administration of justice. The catchment area for the Crown court at Barrow is large enough in size and population to warrant a Crown court being located in Barrow. There has been no change whatsoever in circumstances since Barrow was given Crown court status.
The argument of administrative convenience—the perpetual plea and excuse of all administrators—should


always be secondary to the interests of those the administrators are paid to serve. The administration of justice should serve the local community and the general community, the accused and the society which it is alleged he has offended against. It will be a sad day for justice when administrative convenience is allowed to be paramount and to subsume the overriding interests of the community.
I remind my right hon. and learned Friend that Furness people are taxpayers like the rest of our citizens, and they are entitled to the same administration of justice as the rest of the country.

The Attorney-General (Sir Patrick Mayhew): I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Mr. Franks) for raising this matter on the motion for the Adjournment. As he rightly said a few moments ago, time is limited. The length of his excellent speech means that I have only six minutes in which to reply to the many issues that he has raised.
I appreciate the sensitivity of the issue in my hon. Friend's constituency and the strength of the feelings that he reports and shares. He said that the proposal emanates from a review of the Crown court at Barrow, instituted by the circuit administrator, following the Lord Chancellor's Department's internal scrutiny on the court management structure, the purpose of which is to secure better management. My hon. Friend did less than justice to the local knowledge of the circuit administrator who was responsible for the review.
Sittings of the Crown court in Barrow are held in a magistrates court. The courtroom is adequate. I note the chief constable's view that it cannot justifiably be described as dark or dingy, but it lacks many of the amenities that are normally regarded as minimal requirements today. Facilities for the judge, jurors, barristers and solicitors and witnesses are sparse.
Prisoners are brought from Risley remand centre in Warrington nearly 100 miles away, and have to stay in cells with inadequate provision for hygiene, catering and exercise. The conditions for the police, prison officers and staff have been the subject of frequent complaints, especially by the prison service. Meals have to be purchased from the police canteen, and there are only very basic facilities for eating. Indeed, no tables or chairs are available in the cells.
Although the cells have integral lavatories, there is only one wash-hand basin in the corridor. There are no facilities available for visits to the cell area by solicitors or barristers. Such visits therefore have to be conducted within the cells with no seating available. Visits by relatives of defendants have to be held at the grille gate leading to the cell area, again with no seating.
There are only six cells. Inmates therefore have to share overnight if their number exceeds cell availability. The facilities for prison staff are no more acceptable, amounting to one room, measuring 10 ft. by 6 ft., which is sparsely furnished and in which prison staff spend up to 14 hours per day.
A great deal of money would have to be spent to bring the cell accommodation up to reasonable standard. While that would improve conditions for the prisoners, the cell

area would still be shared with the local police, which I understand does not accord with good practice. Remand prisoners, who are of course unconvicted and may never be found guilty, would continue to be subjected to inordinately lengthy journeys to and from court.
I now come to whether there is sufficient work to justify the continued presence of a Crown court. In 1988, a total of 121 cases for trial were committed to Barrow, with 35 appeals and cases for sentence. Of those committed for trial, about 70 per cent. pleaded guilty, leaving only 35 jury trials.
That is clearly insufficient to justify other than occasional sittings, particularly since some trials cannot be accommodated at Barrow because of their estimated length of hearing. The sitting arrangements at Barrow are limited to a maximum of three days at a time because the courtroom is required thereafter for sittings of the magistrates court. That provides an answer to one of my hon. Friend's questions. Accordingly, a case which may last for two or more days is usually transferred to Lancaster for trial. More than 30 per cent. of cases committed to Barrow are tried at Preston and Lancaster. That has been the case now for several years, as I understand the situation.
Let me return to the proposal that is advanced in the light of the features I have described. It is that, as an alternative to Crown court sittings at Barrow, the work should be dealt with by the Crown court at Lancaster. The journey from Risley would be reduced by half—to 50 miles. It is contended that conditions for prisoners and prison officers would be improved, and there would be significant benefits and savings in cost to the court and to the prison and probation services.
An increase in the work load and sittings at Lancaster would make better use of available accommodation, reduce the likelihood of wasted days, reduce waiting times, and make for more effective listing of cases. Here, I think, it is relevant that the scrutiny to which I have already referred noted the difficulties that generally are faced by small Crown court centres, which are generally satellites of a larger parent court.
The length of the average sitting day at Barrow is typical of those difficulties, in that it is particularly short. In 1988 the average was 3·98 hours. Even this figure is artificially high, as it is often the case that the court is only technically sitting while awaiting a jury's verdict, there not being work available to be dealt with in court during that time.
A prime function of the court service is to facilitate the just, speedy and economical disposal of cases. The short average sitting day that can be achieved at the court at Barrow, the small case load, and the interval between sessions makes for inefficiency and delay in spite of the best efforts of all concerned—and they are very good. A case not reached at one session must wait at least four weeks before it can be listed again at that venue, which, for some defendants, means waiting in custody.
I should like, of course, to deal at greater length with the points that my hon. Friend has made, but, alas, there is insufficient time by reason of the detailed and excellently presented speech he made. I would just say, however, that, uncharacteristically, he is not accurate in saying that the responses received so far by the Lord Chancellor's Department to these proposals have been all one way. Judicial opinion is by no means unanimous, and, of those who have responded to this proposal, the probation


service, the prison service, the Crown prosecution service, and, I understand, the high sheriff also, have indicated some approval or support for the scheme—

The Motion having been made after Ten o'clock and the debate having continued for half an hour, MR. SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned at fourteen minutes before Eleven o'clock.